Prescreen Lessons Learned

Well, I’m a long time lurker who is now eyeball deep! As many of us have just wrapped up this fun step, let’s share lessons learned for the future while it’s still fresh in our heads! Here are a few of mine:

*Do make a pact if you’re helping with this step (and all of it generally). We’ve had a lot of training doing dance competition life for years - that we won’t yell and will be patient or else it isn’t fun or worth it - so we generally get along under crazy circumstances. This training helped a lot! Do have snacks, water, throat coat tea for this part (and all of it really). Best role of parent is cheerleader and supporter, and witholding negative comments for our sensitive artists! I gave her a lot of space to do what she needed and she has a good sense of whether she did what she is capable of. I also left the room for monologues to ensure she was comfortable.

*Do test your outfits on camera, in the space you’re filming if possible, and on your phone and full laptop screen. How do I know this? We filmed everything, came home and it didn’t look great on the laptop, we could see a bra that wasn’t visible on an iphone screen and other issues. So we went back and refilmed it again with a new outfit (late late night run to Target). So the next time we filmed a few, uploaded to laptop and I watched them (she won’t watch herself) through before moving on. Drop Box was excellent for allowing quick uploads between devices for this reason. Dance was filmed separately on a different date. Overall, it took about 3 weekends to get it all done, so give yourself a cushion (we had planned 2 weeks, but her sibling got sick and we had to cancel, you just never know!). You’ll also want plenty of time to watch, edit and review, and allow for ample upload time.

*We wrote out all the requirements for every college (which songs, which shot - chest up, knees up, full body etc), then consolidated by like requirements to see the total number of shots we needed, this helped tremendously. Even then I missed a requirement (to slate for dance for Michigan). Plus a couple schools wanted intro videos so need to prep what to say.

*We needed 3 monologues - 2 contemp, 1 Shakespeare; 3 songs - 2 contemp, 1 classic (pre 1965 (Common Prescreen says 1970, Michigan says 1965 so we used that just in case) - some schools allow 2 contemp and that may be a better fit for your kid. 1 60 second dance, 2 separate choreographed dances for schools that don’t do in person dance calls and 1 ballet across the floor. This helps with planning at the outset.

*When ending a monologue, song or dance, ensure they hold or follow through for another 2 seconds - or an 8 count so you don’t have to cut off the video abruptly at the end. A couple times my kid would crack a smile or joke too early and we had to reshoot it.

*Depending on your list, a few schools require MP4 format vs MOV, which is the iphone format. Converting files can take a LONG TIME and we had to pay for online conversion for large files. Building in time for this is important.

*We upgraded our wifi to the Google Mesh and it helped with uploading tremendously- it was a game changer.

Best of luck to everyone still filming, uploading, editing, submitting and to next year’s class!

regarding the conversion of imovie to mp4 . if you have apple care on ANY APPLE DEVICE, call them up they will walk you through it very simple once you know . they stayed online with us till we confirmed conversion and it uploaded at the respective school