What is the film about?

Notes in an animated sketchbook depict a meandering attempt to investigate the meaning of sounds we hear in the world. But perhaps the only response is to dance.

What influenced it?

I was originally influenced by a Youtube video I came across of some dancers. They were followers of the mystic Gurdjieff and were dancing in unison in a kind of meditative dance that I found entrancing. The music was very evocative and the movements were unusual and precise. Researching the practices of these dance groups got me started down a path that led me to interviewing all kinds of people that use music and movement in their work.

A little background information...

“So I Danced Again…” was my graduation film from the Royal College of Art. I finished it in 2017 but I went back to it this year and reworked a lot of the imagery and also the sound. I initially started with an idea to make an experimental documentary about the people who practice these meditative dances. I tried to find some participants who would be willing to talk about their relationship with the dances but I was unsuccessful.
The film became an attempt to record my investigation into the ways that different people try to access the special power that music and rhythms have over us. I interviewed people who used music in their work, such as a music therapist, a contact dancer, and a dancer/neurologist. It felt like they were all trying to access the same thing as the Gurdjieff dancers – but I still couldn’t quite get my head around what that was. By the end of the project I realised that my attempt to explain something like that was pretty fruitless, so I tried to instead demonstrate in a non-verbal way some of the joy that we all get from music and sound.

How was the film made?

I started with sketches and collages that I had made in my sketchbook and developed these into animation tests, set against clips of audio that I had recorded. I used After Effects to build lots of the compositions out of scanned in paper textures and to sync the animated waveforms to the audio. I wanted to keep the film very textural and a little bit inward looking, like a personal sketchbook.