Dancers show off all their moves from every angle in a new video created by GoPro in collaboration with an Oakland-based dance group.
Intense emotions expressed with creative street dancing moves, laid out on a cardboard mat for a crowd that’s feeling it. That’s Turf dancing, and it already looks awesome. But GoPro tried to up the ante by capturing turf dancers in the San Francisco Bay Area with a custom 360 degree array of cameras that shows their fluid contortions from every angle.
In a video released on YouTube Monday, you can see what it all looks like.
A ring of 100 cameras circled the dance floor as dancers performed in two different locations of The Lab Gallery performance space, one in Oakland and one in San Francisco. Johnny Lopez, better known as Johnny 5, runs the Oakland, California, Turf dance group TURFinc and produced the dance-offs in the video. The video also features some dancers from other parts of the country doing other kinds of street dance moves, like flexing, a dance trend out of New York.
Lopez said he also worked closely with GoPro on what to put in the video. He got connected to GoPro after a friend started working there, and eventually the video project was born. The partnership is a good thing for Turf dance, Lopez said. “It’s pretty inspiring to a lot of youth out there.”
Turf means a lot to those who practice it, and you’ll get a huge dose of emotion along with the dancing. In voice-overs, the dancers say they face problems in Oakland — gangs and gun violence in particular. It’s Turf dancing that helps them channel these bad experiences into positive feelings.
“Once I touch the floor, it feels magical,” one dancer says. “An angel just takes everything away from me.”
Source: cnet.com
