There are many clips of dancers on the internet that you can buy or get for free. Often the issue is not the price – it’s the dancers, and their performance. If you spend hours and hours, as I do, in iMovie, Final Cut Pro, or Da Vinci, for instance, editing those clips down to the last millisecond, you very quickly find the flaws, if they are there. (And vice versa, brilliance is also amplified.)
The problems include a slip in a step, an outfit that obscures the dancer, something ugly in the background, an off-beat move, dancers who do not go well together, or – the worst – an unhappy dancer. There are intense, straight-faced dancers. Then there are dancers who just look belligerent and grim. Those, frankly, I don’t like, because their grimness is often matched with aggressive, twitchy moves – a case of angry is as angry does. And maybe in hip hop that’s a thing. But you can do hip hop and still look like you’re enjoying it.
CHEERFULLY INFORMAL
However, I’ve been lucky. For videos where I needed a pair or a group of dancers, rather than a solo artist, I found this happy trio on Pexels. (They’re in my video Swagger & Swing that you can see in the sidebar.)
Filmed by Polish company, Anthony Shkraba Production, this guy and the two girls with him are the happiest, funkiest group I’ve yet come across. I suspect that they are actors, but the guy is just so dang cute and so flirty, and the girls, well, they look like they know they are pretty, and they look into his eyes as if they’re going to eat him alive and lick off the plate afterwards. As for the dance moves, it looks like the kind of thing ordinary folks would do at a party, not choreographed, but in step, and they bounce around and look pleased with themselves.
The dancers are not identified on Pexels.com, or in the video tags, or on the Instagram page of Anthony (or Antoni) Shkraba, the filmmaker. Recent blocking on Google’s news publication in Canada may be a factor in my failure to identify them. The particular clip, left, has been downloaded 1,400 times, and I found out the clips in this series are pretty much everywhere online, and that people have published them as their own work or collections. These aggregators give little or no credit to the producer, since, in terms of copyright, they don’t have to – none apply. The clips are royalty-free. It makes me wonder what the benefit is for the actors, dancers and filmmakers to put their work, and such a lot of it too, on a platform like Pexels.
focused and professional
That being said, the opposite also applies. Thomas Gellert, a German filmmaker, has a large collection of clips of dancers on Artgrid/Artlist that are worth every cent of the subscription fee. One pair who you can see in the video on Instagram, below, caught my attention. The man is Daniel Alberg (@daniel.alb95), and the woman is Marleen Weppler (@mrs.maliwep). Both are German.
The dancers make a perfect couple. She is gorgeous, he is gorgeous too. He’s got serious muscles. She moves with a lusciousness that is mesmerizing. And that face! Those eyes! Their routine is choreographed, and if you string the clips together, it looks well-planned and aesthetically pleasing. So their hands, feet, and positions go together perfectly.
She is a teacher at a Gesamtschule (a comprehensive school for grades 5 through 12 or 13) and is also a dancer. A caption (translated) on a clip of her and Alberg, on his Instagram page, reads: “You are a teacher and teach at a comprehensive school, but your heart will always burn for your passion.”
Specific routine used in my videos
Daniel Alberg’s personal page on Instagram shows his interests in dancing, cars and boxing. He is 28 years old, born in 1995. His boxing fitness workouts explain those broad shoulders and the lightning-fast spins that he does. His profile, as a trainer of standard and Latin dance, on the website of dance school, TSG Blau-Gold Gießen e.V., states:
“I have been dancing for 23 years and started at the age of 5. Franco Formica inspired me to dance and Bernd Zirkler made it possible for me to get involved in dancing and taught me the first steps. In addition to numerous national championship titles in standard, I was also able to prove myself in the Latin discipline and became multiple runner-up and national champion. One of my most successful tournaments was the German Youth A-Latin Championship where I reached the semi-finals (at the time Christina Luft and Evgeny Vinokurov coached me) and in 2017 I reached the final of the Germany Cup in the A-Latin main group. My current trainers are Motsi Mabuse, Evgenij Voznyuk and Anton Ganapolsky in Latin American dances.” – Profile of Daniel Alberg on TSG Blau-Gold Gießen
Note that one name: Motsi Mabuse – the ex-South African has been a judge on Strictly Come Dancing since 2019. The caliber of his trainers and teachers is one reason why Alberg is so hypnotically good. Wouldn’t you just love to be one of his dance students?
There’s no free lunch
What I’ve learned is this: Selecting video clips for music videos depends on your objective. You need to know what you want to achieve and what you are willing to pay for. If you use free clips you may end up compromising on quality and exclusivity. If you pay for clips, you will probably get both, as well as professionalism and star quality. Back to the old adages: you get what you pay for, and there’s no free lunch. I’m just glad that I found these dancers and that I can use them in my music videos.