Pope embarked on the project mere hours after buying the latest iPhone last fall, shooting the first dancer for Dancers of New York, Anna Pinault. In the video, you see daring leaps, high kicks, and acrobatics slowed down such that you can watch legs stretch and muscles contract with impressive detail. He exclusively used the iPhone 6's 240 fps slo-mo in a short film called Dancers of New York, which has been selected as a contestant in the International Mobil Film Festival. Pope, meanwhile, is an avid user of slo-mo. It saves precious class time, and eliminates ambiguity. With a smartphone, you can capture that movement and replay it to explain exactly what happens moment to moment.
There's only so much you can demonstrate step-by-step, unless you awkwardly suspend yourself in mid-air propped against the barre at the back of the room. Once you leave the ground, you're falling back down at 9.8 meters per second squared, whether you like it or not. Say you're demonstrating a complicated jump for students. Video has been an important part of documenting dance rehearsals, performances, and audition materials for years, but only recently has it begun creeping into dance classes. When the situation calls for slow motion, she uses the Slow-Pro app on her iPhone 5, or uses a borrowed iPhone 6 ("The technology on the iPhone 6 is far superior, so I mooch off of my generous friends whenever I can," Marinelli explained). She's been using video as a teaching aide for about two years, capturing rehearsals with either her iPhone 5 or iPad mini. She uses slo-mo as a teaching tool in dance classes in the Tri-State area, showing, for example, how to properly fall into and rise from the ground smoothly and cleanly, without injury, during contemporary classes. "If my students can't understand the momentum of a certain movement, slo-mo makes it a really simple thing to break it down," freelance dancer and dance instructor Ashley Marinelli told WIRED.