I'm not sure there is such a thing as a "little Nutcracker performance" traditional or not. So I knew I was planning a big performance project when I applied to Lisa's Raq'n Nutcracker online belly dance show, how could I not! Once I was assigned Waltz of the Flowers, visions of Fantasia danced around my mind and suddenly I had 7 costumes I wanted to make for this performance… However costuming will be in a separate blog post (which you can find here), this one is all about how I pulled this massive undertaking together.

The Planning Phase

To make sure I didn't go completely crazy while filming this rapidly growing monster of a project, I started with a written plan. I continued to flesh out this plan into a storyboard and shot list that Z and I would hopefully be able to follow without breaking our brains. Having this plan also allowed me to get creative without having to remember too many things over multiple days of filming.

The "story" I came up with was very simple. I took inspiration from the story of the Nutcracker Ballet. A person goes to sleep, encounters magical and wonderous things, and wakes up back in the real world perhaps a little changed. To tell this story, I had 7 characters. The Dreamer, who sets the stage and gives the audience context to what's happening, and 6 flowers each with their own personality. Peony was Kind , Tiger Lily was Fierce, Morning Glory was Playful, Iris was Joyful, Calla Lily was Haughty, and Poinsettia was Merry.

In the Disney movie Fantasia, flowers spin across the screen while floating on water. Well I wasn't about to bring water into my basement for this, but I did want to incorporate all that spinning. So I mapped out every spin I planned to do at every time stamp. Each time stamp had a different type of spin and I managed to not repeat a single one!

The Set

The performance had two types of sets: when the Dreamer is awake, and when she is asleep. For most of the performance (when she is asleep) the set was very simple. Just my white curtain backdrop and colored lights. I used green lights during the scenes when she is asleep. Otherwise, the asleep set was my boxlights and a ring light.

For the scenes when the Dreamer is awake, I created a little bedroom scene. I used a chair that folds out into a futon for the bed, which I set on top of a fuzzy blanket that acted as a rug. I made the "bed" using one of my blankets and a pillow in a pretty pillow sham. For a bedside table, I brought in an extra end table that didn't weigh too much to add to the scene. I used a candle stick in a pewter candlestick holder for the opening of the performance, and I set that on the bedside table during the performance. I used purple lights for the awake scenes in the back drop to further differentiate it from the asleep scenes.

 The Filming

This process took 4 days shooting 2 costumes every day until the last day when we shot one.

Using the notes and shot list, my partner Z and I methodically went through every bit of choreography I had planned out for each costume. This is very different from how I normally film a show. Typically I dance most of the song a few different times, in different scenes, and then splice those videos together. For this, we had to start and stop the music at specific points multiple times, and I wanted at least 2 takes for each piece of choreography. We also filmed the dance from three different directions. We used my mirrorless Lumix camera for the head on camera, and for each side camera we used my and Z's phones. We had to be meticulous about removing the video footage from the phones and camera after every day of filming so we did not run out of storage space on our phones. I tried to align my costumes so that I didn't have to re-do an entire face of make-up after one of the costumes. You can tell, the second look of each night was a much more BOLD look than the first!

I started with Morning Glory (playful), because I thought that would be the easiest emotion for me to begin with. This flower had the most trial and error involved with the filming because we were still figuring out the process and how to make all of the takes work. Thankfully after we struggled through this one, the rest of the flowers went more smoothly and the second flower we did that night, Cala Lily, went much more quickly.

The next flowers we did were Peony, followed by Iris. I attended a surprise birthday party that night for a friend of mine, and we cut filming so close I ended up having to go to the party in my Iris make-up! It was a VERY bold look for the evening.

Filming day three was Poinsettia and Tiger Lily. I did have to remove my make-up between these two flowers, which took some extra time. But I went out to dinner with a friend that night and at least she appreciated my flamboyant Tiger Lily make-up!

We decided to film the Dreamer on her own day because of the set we needed to build, and the different ways that this one was filmed. For all of the other flowers we were able to leave the cameras, or the phone camera stands, in place and not move them around. However for dreamer, the cameras and lights needed to move for the set. So we filmed the Asleep scenes first, then we brought in the set and filmed the awake scenes.

 We only missed 1 item on our shot list out of 4 days of filming (dreamer’s solo) and I thought that was pretty great! I was able to splice together other takes of my dancing to fill in the one bit of choreography we missed.

The Editing

Editing this performance was the most stressful editing of a video I have ever done. It took 2 days, a crashed program, and learning an entirely new editing program to ultimately complete it.

I started with using Adobe Rush, which I had used for editing all of my other performances with no issues. Approximately 5 hours into editing Adobe Rush crashed on me like it had multiple times before. However, this time I could not open the video. I could see the video in the program. I could see the file for the draft video, but the video would not open. I was even able to open old videos that I had edited in adobe rush and make other edits to them without issue. Just not the file I had spent 5 hours editing already.

I immediately went to any forum on Adobe products that I could find to try and get my project to open. Nothing worked. Nothing worked for almost anyone who also had this problem. On a whim I decided to see if Adobe Rush files could be opened in Adobe Premier Pro. Thank Fucking Goodness they could be opened in Premier Pro. I was so incredibly relieved. I had my files with all of my edits open in the other program. All was not lost. I spent the next 20 hours learning how to use Adobe Premier Pro and editing this video.

It was a colossal edit. Each costume had 3 different camera angles that needed the timing matched up, the spins all needed to be aligned to the music, lighting and color needed to be adjusted between all three cameras, and because of how I framed the shots, I needed to add a floral border to every video to block out parts of my basement I didn't want viewers to see (as seen in dreamer image above). Each flower also had their own "solo" part that I needed to align between the three cameras. While filming, I intentionally looked at each of the cameras, so that I would have good shots of the flowers looking at the audience. Because I took multiple takes of each shot, I also had to comb through each take to choose what looked best. For some the first take was best and in others the 2nd or 3rd take worked better. It was worth having all of the takes done in slightly different ways, because I couldn't have predicted issues I would run into. Things like focus issues, timing being off, skirts spinning a liiiiiittle too high for comfort! The nice thing about having the three cameras is if my focus went weird on one camera, or I didn't like how the shot looked from one angle, I had the other two to make sure I still had good footage.

I want to say that I will never do a video like this again but… With how good the performance turned out, and how well it was received during the online show, I know I will be tempted to do a project like this again. Just maybe with less costume changes XD

The video can be viewed below, I hope you enjoy it. Especially after reading about all the effort that went into it!