Dancing in the Wind

Young girls play on a windy beach as a narrator recites a poem by W. B. Yeats and, as she does, longs for her own youth. This simple piece explores the capacity of moving pictures to evoke strong feeling and emotion in the briefest of moments.

Capturing the unexpected  Ben and Casey found themselves on a beach on Cape Cod during high winds caused by Hurricane Irene in 2011. Amidst the tourists and (near suicidal) windsurfers, three carefree kids stood out. Ben set his camera to slow motion and rolled just a minute or two of tape. Casey shot some still photographs.

Assembling the pieces  Without accompaniment, the raw footage is just cute—but we saw potential to use it as a building block in a short film with a deeper message. Pieces began to come together when we discovered “To a Child Dancing in the Wind” by W. B. Yeats. A natural extrapolation led us to Irish folk music—the traditional session tune “The Rolling Waves.”

Recording the score  Whenever possible we record custom scores for our films, to achieve an intimate connection between the picture and the sound. In this score, fiddle dances lightly upon a droning cello, a contrast in tempo that symbolically links the music to the slow-motion video and stinging wind. In order to achieve exactly the right timing and tempo, Ben directed and Audrey engineered a live recording session. (When it comes to editing, audio, and postproduction, we’re not ashamed to admit that we’re control freaks.)