The First Kangoo Video Was a Rough Draft

It's hard to believe I haven't written in this blog in 60 days, but that's what the date-stamp on my last entry tells me. A lot has happened, and little has been accomplished. C'est la vie.

In November I sent an email to find out what were the requirements for the video I needed to submit to Kangoo USA to become fully licensed as an instructor. I never got an answer, so I decided to just do one song and submit it and see what happened. For the record, it was my own choice not to call and ask, which might have been more effective. When I did submit my one song demo in December, the response was quick and clear: nice enthusiasm, wrong content. I think that makes the first video my rough draft.

Here's how the first video was planned and executed. I chose a song with the right beats per minute (BPM), a good pace for beginners, Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive, Paul McCartney's version. I put together choreography, thinking about what beginners could follow easily and thus gain confidence, emphasizing just rhythm and bounce. I got permission to use a room where I work, with a nicely padded floor (former weight lifting room), and I found four camera operators, two high school students and two college grads with video-related degrees. The students used the school cameras, one grad brought his own camera, the other grad brought the audio recorder and became the director/producer/floor manager. I borrowed a boom box and used my iPhone for the music. We did not put a microphone on me directly, using just the camera sound (one with a shotgun mic) and the audio recorder; I totally underestimated the sound level of the boots hitting the floor, compared to my voice. For the next video, I will use a mic, preferably a headset mic. I also had two volunteers from the Kangoo Jumps class I attend who pretended to be my students for the demo.

For the actual video shoot, we ran through the whole song once as rehearsal, with the cameras rolling. We checked the sound and look of it, made some adjustments to the sound and the camera placements, and did three takes. For planning purposes, I must admit that setup, teardown, and shooting four takes of a 2.5 minute song took us about 90 minutes. Due to scheduling of the grad editing the footage into one coherent video, it took a few days to get all the footage into the right computer and do the editing. Once it was done, I had my editor post it to her Google Drive and sent the link to my Kangoo USA contact. Emailing it was not an option because our finished file was enormous.

So, flash forward to today. I heard back that the video we spent so much time on was not what they needed to see, and I wondered for a few days if I wanted this badly enough to record and submit a video that will have to include seven very specific elements and be 7-12 minutes long. In the meanwhile, several more people came to me and said they can't wait until I am licensed so they can take my class. Being very susceptible to that kind of peer pressure, I am now working on a breakdown of how to get all these separate items recorded a little at a time, and edit them together, but much more simply than the rough draft, to keep the file size down.

To all who have encouraged me, and continue to...thank you. Keep up the good work, and I'll keep working on seeing this through to completion.