I took as my source a low resolution short video of a rehearsal of a duet. The progression of the movement was intriguing because of the extreme body extensions and tenderness between the dancers. I decided to capture the movement progression through building a sequence of still photographs from the video, using a phone camera to capture paused and moving segments from a PC screen.

This photographic recapture process created pleasing corruption and simplification of the still images.

As an experiment, to test the introduction of colour, I took a screen shot of a sub-set of the images that were displayed as a tiled group in the phone’s photo library and used photo editing software to introduce colour . This process created a tiled multiple that showed the movement progression of the dancers. The colouring process had also developed interesting patterns in cell backgrounds and the borders between the photo cells. These effects were intensified using photo editing software. I now had the ability to crop the multi cell image to create smaller group or individual photo cells. The simplified painterly effect produced by the process was very intriguing.

I then made a second version of the tiled image with different colours and mirrored it before overlaying it on the original image. This overlayed mostly different cells so two stages in the movement were revealed in each cell. A small number of image pairs were the same, simply reversed and gave a kaleidoscopic mirrored effect. The resultant images took the source material into a richer interpretation of the duet that incorporated elements of expressionism and semi abstraction and became immersive.

Tiled single and double layer images are shown below with some examples of individual photocells, again with double layers.

The final two images built further on the tiled group of cells, further modifying colours, patterns and details. They more strongly explore expressionism and semi-abstraction.