Entrelacé: How technology, movement and visuals are interlaced in the film design for The Royal Ballet’s Woolf Works (original) (raw)

2018, Electronic Workshops in Computing

The Royal Ballet's Woolf Works, directed by Wayne McGregor, expresses multidisciplinary thinking by combining choreography, technology and design through the mediums of dance, sound, film, light and space. This paper will consider how movement and visual projections are interconnected through the film sequences produced by Ravi Deepres for 'Wolf Works.' Each film sequence uses different technologies to express Deepres' conceptual ideas relating to Virginia Woolf and her writing. These include the use of super slow motion technologies, architectural scanning and 3D modelling. The sequences were all embedded into the performance and were integral to the overall narrative structure. On stage the film sequences were presented cinematically, at huge scale, as part of a transformation of the dance performance space into a cinematic experience. While the sequences played other design forms such as movement, choreography, sound and light unified the overall performance. Articulating the working methods and processes of Deepres' practice, the paper will examine the successes and challenges of the project. It will also offer a philosophy of working that integrates the collaboration of different disciplines (choreography, sound, music and cinema) with new technologies. One of the case studies that will be presented is 'The Waves', a film sequence, shot in super slow motion using a Phantom Gold camera at Godrevy lighthouse (one of the locations Woolf visited frequently in Cornwall). The footage begins as a virtually static image then builds over a period of 25 minutes, a duration rarely used with this technology. In the paper Deepres will detail his conceptual approach and the technological challenges associated with producing and displaying the work. The paper will ultimately articulate a real world example of the relationship between artist, technology and performing arts. It will ask how the layers of narrative, articulated through multiple mediums and expressed through a range of technology, can operate at both a dependent and also independent level.