Finishing Snik and Snok on the Moon

I have been really busy the last five months working on Snik and Snok on the Moon a contemporary dance performance for kids that relies heavily on video to tell a science fiction story. The theme for the story is how the pursuit of social status and material goods can get in the way for the real big issue: Saving the planet. Frustrating at times, rewarding at others; it has been a real challenge, and a great learning experience. I have already writen about the start of the prosess, and about our trip to Jordan. Now I would like to illuminate a part of the building process in my litte studio at the best atelier community in Oslo: GrynerlÃ¸kka Lufthavn. It is impossible for show it all, because there are hundreds of images, but I will roughly try to guide you through the process.

Storyboard

In the beginning, the girls had a rough script and I made a rough storyboard as they explained the story to me. This initial step is very much a collaboration. We were all deciding together on how things will look. Important questions are raised. How many scenes do we need to descirbe the action taking place? Shall the heroes enter from the right or the left? What are the different components that we will have to build to realise our vision? ect.

After thinking and discussing about how everything should look, I made this conceptual image so that we all knew more or less where we were going.

Making rough models

Lufthavna
Copyright Siljeholm/Christophersen 2011

I made lists of all the different things I would have to build, and the started building the most important models first. The city seemed really important since it was in a lot of shots. We were also quite ambitious; I wanted all the models to be fairly big so we could film them and maybe even have camera movements. I wanted to make everything like a real movie production. So I made it big. And cheap. Really, really cheap, using cardbord boxes from the wine-monopoly.

Blueprint

Snik and Snok on the Moon is not a movie. It is a multimediated dance performance. What goes on on the screens has to connect to what goes on on stage. The height of a person standing in the foreground of the projected video, has to match the height of an actual person on stage. To be able to marry the video with the live action, we went through a “blueprint” prosess. This was all done in the NCCA in Amman, Jordan. Using the storyboard as guides, we tried to create a rough version of the final image in the correct scale. This was done by making a collage in photoshop using photographs of my rough models, but also by drawing. The images i made on the computer could be projected onto the stage in realtime. This way we could make sure that everything fit.

Producing the final image

After everything was planned I had to basically just go to work and produce images that Ludvig Friberg, the animator and video artist, could animate and arrange in the final videostream. Sadly a lot of energy was wasted as the script continuously got rewritten. I had to retrace my steps many times and was quite confused at times. A lot of the material was cut out of the final version. My darlings! I also think that the final script is much better than the first one. I just wish it was all written in stone before any of the images were made. All in all it was a lot of fun. I am just glad to have had the opportunity to be part of a project as far out as this one. I enjoyed fantasizing about science fiction and building the models. But most of all it was great to work with all of these fantastic people.

The is so much more I want to show, but I have to draw the line somewhere. The tiny images you see here have a quite diffenent feeling from the large ones that you can see on stage. Also they are animated by Ludvig Friberg who also did some amazing special effects. Here are some pictures from the actual play, but they donÂ´t move, and there is no sound. The music made by Sverre Eide is actually pretty cool and very important to the overall experience. It is really best to just go and see the show.

Snik og Snok on the Moon had its premiere on Dramatikkens Hus the 26th of November 2011

Touring premiere: 6th March 2012, Fagernes Kulturhus. On tour with Teater Innlandet 6-15th March 2012
World premiere April 2012 at Amman Contemporary Dance Festival, Jordan
Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival, Palestine, April 2012
Beirut International Platform of Dance, Lebanon, April 2012
Nordens Hus, Faeroe Islands, 7th May 2012
Katuaq, Greenland, 5-8th June 2012
Nordens Hus, Iceland, 11-13th June 2012