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Video makes the cut

Stafford High School graduate gets animation video shown in New York City film festival

By LUCIA ANDERSON

Date published: 1/26/2004

By LUCIA ANDERSON Animation shown in New York City

Jeremy Cropp is pleased with the reception his work got in New York City this month.

"Relative Movement," a one-minute animated video comparing the movements of ballet and martial arts, was selected to be shown at the Dance on Camera Festival just concluded in New York.

"It went really well," Cropp said in a telephone interview from his parents' Stafford County home after the festival. "I got a good response. It was pretty neat."

Cropp, 24, is the son of Henry and Janet Cropp of Stafford's Huntington Hills subdivision, and a 1997 graduate of Stafford High School.

He was encouraged when a Dutch filmmaker at the New York festival said that he wanted Cropp's video for an upcoming film festival in Amsterdam.

"It was a really good experience, Cropp said.

There were 204 entries for the festival, and his was one of 50 selected.

"He had a very clear vision, and he realized it," said Deirdre Towers, executive director of the Dance Film Association in a telephone interview from New York City before the festival.

The Dance on Camera Festival is a once-a-year showcase for people who film dance, and is sponsored by the Dance Film Association.

Cropp's video was one of 14 in a program titled Kinetic Spaces, devoted to dance and technology.

Towers said this program is something of a departure for the festival, as it generally concentrates on longer films of live dance.

"There were enough shorts with the same thread, choreography done in the editing room," Towers said. "They depend on today's technology for their effects."

Cropp videotaped a ballerina from the Richmond Ballet and the routines of a martial artist, then combined them on his computer. The ballerina is in three dimensions; the martial artist is in two-dimensional hand-drawn animation.

"It's really complicated," Cropp said. The project took him four months to complete.

"It's so accessible," Towers said. "His two characters are clear and their interaction is clear. It fit into the context of this program."

The video was a project for two of Cropp's classes at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he was studying communication arts and design with a focus in animation and video. He graduated last year.

"I've always been interested in looking at movement," Cropp said. Ballet and martial arts are "very elegant, controlled, the way they move their bodies." The two disciplines are "pretty relative but very different," he said.

Cropp is working as a freelance videographer in Richmond, but says his ultimate goal is filmmaking.

"It's not an easy profession to get a steady income going," Cropp said. "But I love to do it."

To reach LUCIA ANDERSON: 540/374-5405 landerson@freelancestar.com

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Date published: 1/26/2004