A toilet plunger, a child’s scooter, and bendable selfie sticks were among the unconventional grip tools used on Swan Lake Bath Ballet. But the entire concept behind this three-minute short was outside the box: Take Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake ballet, place it in bathtubs of dancers around the world, and shoot it remotely during Covid lockdown.

“Corey Baker definitely loves a challenge,” says the bicontinental British-Australian cinematographer Nicola Daley, ACS, about the project’s director/choreographer. “He’s done a dance piece in Antarctica and one on the rooftops of Hong Kong. He likes to set big goals.”

Baker, founder of Corey Baker Dance in Birmingham, England, pitched the concept to BBC Arts for their Culture in Quarantine series and landed a commission. He recruited 27 elite dancers from 18 ballet troupes in a dozen countries, including his native New Zealand and adopted home of England.

The cinematographer was hungry for a break from the inertia of lockdown, so she quickly said yes after producer Anne Beresford introduced her to Baker. She was up for the creative challenge, but the bathrooms gave her pause. “Bathrooms are renowned for being bad locations,” says Daley. “When he said we’re going to do a whole film there, I thought, Gosh, how are we going to make this look good?”

Their success is reflected in Swan Lake Bath Ballet’s viral numbers: 4.5 million views on BBC’s Facebook page in the first month alone, and more still on the UK-only BBC iPlayer.

Baker’s choreography is playful and inspired, an amalgam of swan-like fluttering limbs, dramatic wet-hair-whips, and bits inspired by Esther Williams and Busby Berkeley. It’s colorful, since the dancers sit in water pigmented by bath bombs, and it’s fun, with props that include swan bath toys, inflatable swan lifesavers, and bucket-loads of feathers.

In prep, the first step was to remotely scout bathrooms. They sent the dancers a questionnaire: Did their bathroom have a window and, if so, what time of day had the best light? What additional lights did they have on hand? (Some Instagram-savvy dancers owned soft boxes. Another had an LED with adjustable color.) Did they have a pool? (Yes, in the Hamptons and South Africa.) What kind of smartphone did they own? (The ratio was 70/30 Apple/Android, with the majority of iPhones being Xs and 11s.) Did they have a second device to Zoom on?

They solicited photos. Then a further bathroom scout was conducted via Zoom. The whole process “was strangely intimate,” says Daley.

All those phones were outfitted with Filmic Pro V6, complements of the company. “Filmic Pro really helped us out,” Daley says with gratitude. (Not wanting to be greedy, they didn’t request Filmic Pro’s supplementary app, Cinematographer’s Kit, which offers LogV2 with 2.5 extra stops of latitude.)

Baker sent the dancers video tutorials to teach them the choreography, while Daley sent instructions for setting up the basics on Filmic Pro: 25 fps, 4K when possible (some Androids could only do 3K), and framing for 16:9. Other settings, like white balance and exposure, would wait until she could actually see their smartphone screen and give verbal instructions on Zoom.

When it came time to connect, the line producer would use TeamViewer to gain access to the dancer’s screen. (To assure privacy, production could only see the screen, not take command of the phone.) That TeamViewer feed became the dominant panel on Zoom, flanked by the director, cinematographer, line producer, and dancer or their assisting partner or family member. Daley would coach each dancer to get their phone into position for the desired framing, a process that could be quite painstaking. Dancers would play the music on their end, given Zoom’s slight time lag.

In addition to Filmic Pro, every dancer received a care package—or everyone in countries that Amazon could reach. (Dancers in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa were out of luck.) That package included a bendable selfie stick, which was critical for getting a birds-eye perspective over the tub. The brand varied by country, but all had a gooseneck of at least three feet. Thus they could be clamped to the shower head or bathroom door and reach the center of the tub. “That was really useful,” says Daley. Alignment had to be perfect, especially for those Busby Berkeley bits and in sections edited to have a virtual ballet corps in multiple panels.

Those dancers who did not receive a selfie stick had to wing it. “People were very innovative,” Daley attests. She mentions one South African who suctioned a toilet plunger to the side of the shower. Then there was “the dancer in New Zealand, bless him, who had a laundry basket, two stools on top of each other, a box, then a broom handle,” Daley recalls. “He gaffer-taped the phone to the end of the broom handle. He went above and beyond.”

Dancers also received bath bombs. “I don’t normally do art department stuff,” the cinematographer says, “but I was at home testing colors of bath bombs and filming them on my phone, so we could work out what colors looked good and what didn’t dye their clothes or cause any harm, which is why we used kids’ products.” Some dancers also got a shipment of feather pillows, or little swan lights. One even got an inflatable wading pool.

The opening shot required a slow push-in on a tub surrounded by candles, so the ballerina in Boston was shipped a gimbal. But when it came time to shoot, Daley recounts, “Her husband said, ‘I don’t like it. I’m not very good at it. But I’ve done this.’ He turned the laptop around and we saw that he’d gaffer-taped the gimbal to his kid’s scooter. He said, ‘Look, I can do it much smoother on this,’ then showed us. It was a brilliant trick.”

That Boston couple went the extra mile in art direction, too. The setting was actually their living room, which had floor-to-ceiling mirrors in a fireplace niche. “On their own volition, they went to a local plumber and said, ‘Can we borrow a bath?’ He delivered it and donated it to them for two days free,” Daley says. Without a shower head, the selfie stick wouldn’t work, so the husband Velcroed a small box to the ceiling to hold the smartphone. It was the dancer’s idea to dress in a classic white tutu and feather headpiece. “She sent pictures of herself in the full tutu. Corey wanted it to be very modern, but when he saw her in her full regalia, he’s like, ‘Right, she can open the film in that location.’ ”

This Boston shoot was one of the few times Daley felt the smartphone’s dynamic shortcomings. During the grade, she says, “You could tell with the highlights of those candles. They clipped easily, whereas with an Arri camera or whatever, all those highlights would roll off beautifully. But in general, I was really surprised by how great the footage was.”

After each shoot, the dancers would deliver the clips and also keep them on their phone for back-up. “The line producer worked out that Dropbox was the best lossless way to send everything. WeTransfer took too long,” says Daley. The edit was done at Exile in New York, and the color grade happened at Technicolor London.

Shooting remotely meant that Daley couldn’t be there to shape the light, “which was frustrating,” she admits. “So a lot of that happened in grade.” For instance, two doorways flanking the fireplace niche were distracting in their whiteness. “I took them right down in the grade, because obviously I couldn’t flag them off.”

Daley graded remotely, working from home in the coastal town of Margate, 71 miles east of London, while colorist Jodie Davidson was in a proper suite at Technicolor London grading on a DaVinci Resolve. They used the company’s new proprietary Tech Stream app to connect, which allowed Daley to watch the grade live on her iPad. “That was in the process of being developed, then when lockdown happened, they accelerated it,” she says. The cinematographer had previously done live remote grading for the episodic series Paradise Lost, but that pipeline was Technicolor London to Technicolor New York. “If the app had been working then, I wouldn’t have had to go on the train for 90 minutes to London. I could have stayed in my house!” she says.

Looking back at the project, Daley says, “I’m really, really proud of it. I needed a chiropractor after sitting down for three weeks on Zoom for 10 hours a day. But it was definitely something very creative to do.

“It taught me that naturally having an eye for something that looks good…not everybody has that,” she continues. “Some people are really good at it, and for some people, it was a real struggle.” The time it took to explain the desired frame—Go up. No, too much. Now a smidgen to your left, etc.—helps explain why a three-minute short took three weeks to film. “After one particularly frustrating shoot, I said to the director, ‘I think camera operators’ and cinematographers’ jobs are safe!” Daley says with a satisfied laugh.

 First published in the October/November 2020 issue of American Cinematographer.