What’s up folks. My name is Rohan, I danced on DRP from 2009 to 2013 and was captain during the 2012-2013 school year. While I was captain, I got frustrated with formations, and put together a barebones danceapp over a christmas break. Since then, the app has come a long way. I’m sharing it here, hoping that more people find this to be as useful as I did
URL is www.danceapp.us
Teams including DRP, Bhangra Empire, Cal Bhangra, NSG, Bruin Bhangra, Cal Alumni, Raas Ruckus, Zor, RVD, and Zeher have been using this to choreo formations. DRP since 2013.
Some things that may not be immediately obvious when using the app:
- you can shift click to select multiple dancers at once (for movement or color changes)
- there is undo/redo buttons with ctrl-R and ctrl-U
- the workflow is to create frames, set dancer positions in each frame, and press the play button. If you want to checkpoint your work or share it etc, 'publish' will create a url with the formation at that point in time.
- works on chrome on mac, everything else is not guaranteed.
- Once you ‘publish’ a formation, you can share it around. Others can edit it, publish it again, it’ll create a new URL.
Here is an example formation: http://danceapp.us/evnAlLx1LZCB91eNzEBl
We have a facebook group where you can post questions & feedback, feel free to join it and post to your heart’s content: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1476002079314364/
More story:
Ever year since my first year on DRP in 2009, I noticed how painful teaching formations could be during practices and tried to make a formations app. Each year I used a different method and got a little bit further each time but ultimately didn’t know what I was doing. As I became more senior on the team, a lot of the formation choreography fell on me. When we needed a smooth transition in short notice, I’d end up whipping out my notebook and scribbling a bunch of dots and arrows. It took a while and was difficult to visualize, and sometimes failed. By the time I was captain, I realized that I NEEDED a way to spread the burden of making formations - I couldn't do it on my own.
Formations are non-trivial to create esp for first-timers on the team. Giving someone 2-3 hours of practice time to teach everyone a formation and then only realizing it doesn't work AFTER spending 2-3 hours of practice time is frustrating for everyone.
So over winter break of senior year, I put together a very basic version of this app (2D formations, movement, can save and send to someone). Over time, we realized this solved a bunch of problems for us: no collisions. If it worked on the app, we KNEW it would work in person. People could theoretically learn their formations ahead of time ( but this never happened for us ). But best of all, we could kind of see what the formation looked liked before committing a few hours to trying it. And send it to each other. By Bruin 2013, most if not all of our formations for the entire set were made in the app.
The app still had many things left to be desired. A huge one of those being the fact that it was 2D only, and birds-eye view only. When doing choreo we were all about the 'front row' effect… Trying to arouse the most intense emotions from the front row audience with our dancing. And formations play a big role in that. Not being able to see what the formations looked like from the front row on the app made it difficult for us to tell if this was the case before trying it out in practice.
So, after graduating, I spent some time and re-vamped it with 3D, and continued to add features over the years. In 2014/2015 a close friend Pavan (also DRP captain 2014-2015) jumped in to start working on the app as well and has since added many of the app's best features.
Anyways, feel free to use it / share it / join the fb group / let us know what you think
URL is www.danceapp.us
Teams including DRP, Bhangra Empire, Cal Bhangra, NSG, Bruin Bhangra, Cal Alumni, Raas Ruckus, Zor, RVD, and Zeher have been using this to choreo formations. DRP since 2013.
Some things that may not be immediately obvious when using the app:
- you can shift click to select multiple dancers at once (for movement or color changes)
- there is undo/redo buttons with ctrl-R and ctrl-U
- the workflow is to create frames, set dancer positions in each frame, and press the play button. If you want to checkpoint your work or share it etc, 'publish' will create a url with the formation at that point in time.
- works on chrome on mac, everything else is not guaranteed.
- Once you ‘publish’ a formation, you can share it around. Others can edit it, publish it again, it’ll create a new URL.
Here is an example formation: http://danceapp.us/evnAlLx1LZCB91eNzEBl
We have a facebook group where you can post questions & feedback, feel free to join it and post to your heart’s content: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1476002079314364/
More story:
Ever year since my first year on DRP in 2009, I noticed how painful teaching formations could be during practices and tried to make a formations app. Each year I used a different method and got a little bit further each time but ultimately didn’t know what I was doing. As I became more senior on the team, a lot of the formation choreography fell on me. When we needed a smooth transition in short notice, I’d end up whipping out my notebook and scribbling a bunch of dots and arrows. It took a while and was difficult to visualize, and sometimes failed. By the time I was captain, I realized that I NEEDED a way to spread the burden of making formations - I couldn't do it on my own.
Formations are non-trivial to create esp for first-timers on the team. Giving someone 2-3 hours of practice time to teach everyone a formation and then only realizing it doesn't work AFTER spending 2-3 hours of practice time is frustrating for everyone.
So over winter break of senior year, I put together a very basic version of this app (2D formations, movement, can save and send to someone). Over time, we realized this solved a bunch of problems for us: no collisions. If it worked on the app, we KNEW it would work in person. People could theoretically learn their formations ahead of time ( but this never happened for us ). But best of all, we could kind of see what the formation looked liked before committing a few hours to trying it. And send it to each other. By Bruin 2013, most if not all of our formations for the entire set were made in the app.
The app still had many things left to be desired. A huge one of those being the fact that it was 2D only, and birds-eye view only. When doing choreo we were all about the 'front row' effect… Trying to arouse the most intense emotions from the front row audience with our dancing. And formations play a big role in that. Not being able to see what the formations looked like from the front row on the app made it difficult for us to tell if this was the case before trying it out in practice.
So, after graduating, I spent some time and re-vamped it with 3D, and continued to add features over the years. In 2014/2015 a close friend Pavan (also DRP captain 2014-2015) jumped in to start working on the app as well and has since added many of the app's best features.
Anyways, feel free to use it / share it / join the fb group / let us know what you think