Ailey II

So right after our first meeting with Ellia, we learned that the last big show of the Performing Arts Center was going to be in two days. The program was Ailey II, a dance show from the popular New York City dance company of Alvin Ailey. This gave our group an excellent chance to get good footage.

During the day the Ailey II dancers did a dress rehearsal and they invited students from Mercyhurst Prep School to watch and even participate. I was not there myself but John, our videographer was, and he got almost an hour and a half of great footage of the dance company and student interaction.

Later on that night the Ailey II dancers went on stage and did their performance. Me and three other group members went to film the show and get some interviews with the audience members during intermission. The publicist said that we could film the show for B-roll, but when we got there they said that they had changed their mind. At first I was upset because I thought that gave us a chance to get some great footage, but instead it made us rely on the audience members and what they had to say. Before the show we got a chance to interview these two guys who are always dressed in outrageous outfits riding a tandem bicycle around campus. Their names are Jesse and Ricardo and they love the arts and being cultured. During the interview they gave so many good answers that would fit perfectly for the documentary. Unfortunately I did not have a tripod with me, so I had to film by hand, and I forgot to charge my camera so we had to stay near a wall outlet when filming. This did not ruin the shots, but they did not turn out as nicely as they could have. Either way the audio from the interview will provide me with some great sound bites to add to B-roll.

A sound bite is just like a VO except it is not narrated it is captured from another source, like an interview or just the natural sound from the background.

Sound bites should not be shorter than 7 seconds or longer than 13 seconds. There is nothing worse in a documentary than endless amounts of talking with no B-roll so please if you are going to have a long sound bite, break it up with lots of good various B-roll.

After we interviewed Jesse and Ricardo we interviewed a few dancers, a long friend of the D’Angelos and several students. Everyone gave us so many great answers that it will be hard to end the documentary at 30 minutes.

Here is a video of the awesome Ailey II dance company. Like I said before I was not allowed to film any of the show, so instead I grabbed this from Youtube.



This video was not filmed by me. I found it on Youtube, on the AileyOrganization channel.