The Next Step is a film surrounding collegiate dance teams, specifically the University of Miami Sunsastions. Our production acknowledges the journey of collegiate dancers through their Instagram page, magazine article, and interviews, and B-roll footage. The Next Step reminds us that dance is underappreciated and can continue after high school.
In order to create the final product of our short documentary, The Next Step, my group gathered a great deal of research to make our vision come to life. Researching several college dance teams and their history was vital, but the biggest challenge was creating the perfect layout for our film. To gain inspiration, we looked on several streaming platforms, such as Disney+ and Netflix. We found a series featured on Disney+ titled On Pointe which gives the viewer a behind-the-scenes look at life at The School of American Ballet in New York City; it consisted of a total of six episodes. Another series titled We Speak Dance, on Netflix, consisted of five episodes. Although these two docuseries are dance-related, they aren't focused on college/athletic dance teams. When we were learning about documentaries earlier in the year, the titles Ugly Delicious and Abstract featured on Netflix ranged from five to eight episodes.
A typical characteristic when it comes to documentaries is the interviews and the camera angles. The B-roll footage can vary depending on the type of documentary that is being shown. These conventions were in the docuseries we had watched in class. We made sure to follow the specific conventions of this genre to make it look formal. We shot two separate angles on two different cameras. The interviewees were not focusing on the camera and were placed in the left third of the screen, which is typical in documentaries. For our B-roll footage, we decided to focus more on actual footage of the Sunsations dance team to give the viewers a visualization of what the interviewees were discussing.
When deciding the target audience for our documentary, we thought about past films related to dance that we could gain inspiration from. One of the more popular titles is Dance Moms, which is a reality show with a TV-PG rating; it typically attracts a female audience consisting of tweens and teenagers. We compared this to a show with an older demographic, So You Think You Can Dance; this show attracts an audience of adults in the 18-49 age range.
Our copious research led us to determine our target audience. It is true that 71% of dancers in the world are female, while 29% are male. With this information, we wanted to have our target audience focus on females ranging from pre-teens to women in their mid-twenties. Since our film focuses on dance teams in college, we felt like this is the best age range to attract the most viewers for our genre.
The brand created for the final production was not only created to engage our audience, but also to get a visual representation of how much collegiate dance teams should be acknowledged. We did incorporate this in our video excerpt, but I feel as if it could’ve been better represented on our social media page, as well as the magazine article. Since Jennifer and I had the task of filming and editing the video, Autumn had the task of the other creative supplements. They were not created to the fullest potential as they could’ve been. I feel like we could have depicted more and put more time and effort into those two elements of the project and all added our individual creativity.
In addition to the target audience being young adults in college and high school, there can be a lot of social issues due to the popularity of social media in this generation. Dancers struggle with their body image for the sake of constantly studying themselves in a mirror with every move. Dancers typically are vastly self-critical, making themselves feel insecure. Not only is the topic of mental health often ignored in the dance community, but the work ethic and physical labor dancers endure are extremely challenging; especially when it comes to collegiate dance. Society thinks of dance as an art that people do for fun, but in reality, it is just as laborious as any other sport.
The only show that I have seen that represented the college dance world is Lifetime’s So Sharp. This 2017 series discusses the Louisville Lady Birds. We thought it would be unique for our series to have a separate episode for each individual team. The University of Miami, the University of Florida, Florida State University, Arizona State University, the University of Minnesota, and Pennsylvania State University were the colleges we chose to highlight in our docuseries.
After working on The Next Step and reflecting on the creative process, final production has made me realize that even with the difficult circumstances of a global pandemic, you can absolutely do anything you set your mind to and focus on. Things may not always go as planned, but that is what makes one grow as an artist. I am grateful for the knowledge and experience that this project, and media studies as a whole, has brought to my education.
