Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Making a Dance Sequence with the Barre HUD


Making a Dance Sequence with the Barre HUD 120829

One of the features of the Barre HUD is recording dance sequences. I've written before about how to do sequenced choreography and making sequences from the database. I could have made the sequence described in this blog post by selecting the dances, then timing them to the desired transition point and assembling and testing the sequence. However, the sequence I wanted to make included some dances that start off the center point and would switch at a point other than the loop point. I thought that the Barre recording feature would be an ideal solution to making a reasonably good sequence and I would learn how sequence making works with the Barre,

SELECTING THE DANCES FOR THE SEQUENCE

The sequence I was working on is Dance Sequence 392 and features six dances that are in the Ministry of Motion (MoM) Kama Sutra HUD. These are the only female solo dances in the HUD and I thought it would be fun to make a sequence from these dances. The six dances are
  • Burlesque 1(f)
  • Burlesque 2(f)
  • Baby Cakes (f)
  • Daisy Duke (f)
  • Dancing Queen (f)
  • Butter Babe (f)
Two of the dances, Burlesque 1(f) and Burlesque 2(f), begin at the center point facing forward. The other four begin off the center point as shown in Pictures 1 through 4. Each of these pictures was taken with me on a choreography grid that faces north at the very start of the dance.

Picture 01 - Baby Cakes_(f)

Picture 02 - Butter Babe_(f)

Picture 03 - Daisy Duke_(f)

Picture 04 - Dancing Queen_(f)
I wanted to start the sequence at the center point so that meant the first dance had to be one of the two Burlesque Dances. Next, I ran the two Burlesque dances to see if there are places in either of the dances that are close to the starting points in any of the off-starting point dances. Burlesque_1(f) has a position part way through the dance that is close to the starting point of Baby Cakes_(f). This looked like a good transition point. I repeated the process and found transition points for all of the dances that made a dance sequence like this:

Burlesque_1(f)
Baby Cakes_(f)
Daisy Duke_(f)
Dancing Queen_(f)
Butter Babe_(f)
Burlesque_2(f)


Of course, in almost all of the cases, the transition point was not at the looping point. This meant that I had either to shorten each dance and transition before one loop was completed or let a dance loop then continue to the transition point. I decided to let each dance loop at least once.

RECORDING THE SEQUENCE WITH THE BARRE HUD

Since I had never used the Barre HUD for recording a dance sequence, I decided to read the help pages on the Barre website about recording. Once I knew how to start recording and stop recording plus recover the sequence information, I felt ready to develop the sequence.

I put the dances in my Barre HUD and added them to one of my notecards in the order I wanted to play them. Then, all I did was work with the dances until I could freestyle the sequence with transitions at the right points. I used the choreography grid looking from above to do this. After I felt good about the freestyle sequence and felt confident that I could switch dances at the right point, I was ready to record.

My first attempt gave me this sequence from the Barre HUD:

Burlesque_1(f)|28.8
Baby Cakes_(f)|40.1
Daisy Duke_(f)|27.4
Dancing Queen_(f)|53.7
Butter Babe_(f)|36.0
Burlesque_2(f)|45.9

I converted it to one line and added a name and a repeat:

Burlesque_1(f)|28.8|Baby Cakes_(f)|40.1|Daisy Duke_(f)|27.4|Dancing Queen_(f)|53.7|Butter Babe_(f)|36.0|Burlesque_2(f)|45.9|[REPEAT]

and I put it in a Barre notecard.

ADJUSTING THE SEQUENCE

It is particularly difficult to do a sequence with dances that start off the center point, but the initial recorded sequence looked pretty good. Most of the transitions had slight jumps, which I had expected and knew I could not overcome because the match up of positions was not perfect. I decided to leave the sequence as it was. I did add the NAME to it for publication ...

[NAME]Kama Mama|Burlesque_1(f)|28.8|Baby Cakes_(f)|40.1|Daisy Duke_(f)|27.4|Dancing Queen_(f)|53.7|Butter Babe_(f)|36.0|Burlesque_2(f)|45.9|[REPEAT]