Step Sisters
Director: Charles Stone III
I love cutting music and dance, and I’m a huge fan of Charles’ film Drumline, so when I got the opportunity to work with him on a film about the collegiate fraternity and sorority stepping world, I leapt. And I wasn’t disappointed with the experience! Step Sisters premiered on Netflix in 2018.
Trailer
Stepping Montage
While most of the stepping sequences were performed by actors rather than professional dancers, this montage was danced by hugely talented, dedicated steppers.
This sequence is a single montage of a number of different routines, each of which was danced at its own unique tempo. That created an extra layer of challenge… we had to make all those different tempos work with one single piece of music.
Theta Step #3
Editing the stepping sequences presented unique challenges. While there was some music involved, the routines were not shot with playback. The steps and claps of the performers were the music. Normally, when I edit dance, I sync up all the takes shot for a number and work from that locked up group. But because there was no playback here, the performance in each take ran at a slightly different pace. No two takes would hold sync from beginning to end. It made the editing more painstaking, but still incredibly fun.
