Backstage: Live 4 Dance with Denisa Kudlackova

It’s been a while since our last video but it’s been worth the wait. We’re here with a new video and it’s quite different to what you’ve seen in the past but we personally love what Madmenmedia have created together with Denisa Kudlackova.

The final video is fast, energetic and Denisa makes it look easy but don’t let it fool you, making this video meant spending 12 hours on set, eight people were part of the crew and as you can see in the backstage video, it wasn’t particularly warm either – the location was in a warehouse in Brno and for the whole day, the temperature was as low as 10°C. After a few hours it feels cold even if you’re wearing jeans and a jacket, let alone if you’re dancing in hot pants and a sports bra, we all admire Denisa for this.

If you don’t know Denisa already, let us introduce this extremely talented young dancer. She is actually one of the top Czech pole dancers and an owner of the One2One pole dance studio in Brno, Czech Republic. She has won the Pole Art competition twice, in 2016 and 2017, she is a Czech record holder 2015 and she’s successful even behind the borders of the Czech Republic. She was one of the finalists of the Pole Sports IPSF World Championship in 2014 and she’s the European Pole Battle 2015 Champion. Sounds quite impressive, right?

Well, she also passes her knowledge and skills on, not only in her own dance studio, in 2015 she also spent a month in Top Show school in Xien, China as a lecturer and she is a Pole Dance & Fitness Instructor at Pole Dance Academy.

Madmenmedia, who have created the video, are also from Brno, Czech Republic and for the past six years, they have been focusing on advertising, aftermovies, 2D and 3D animation.

And how did Madmenmedia and Denisa come up with the idea of creating a video together with Dragonfly? Well, they met on set of an advertising campaign and as they both say, they immediately clicked and agreed they have to create something together.

Ondrej from Madmenmedia says: “We knew we wanted to create something unique, something that hasn’t been in any other pole dance video. And so we came up with the idea of mixing four different dance styles in one choreography… When we were explaining our idea to Denisa, we were quite worried she will say no because it’s definitely not an easy choreography but she said we should do it and she took it as a challenge.”

But again, getting from an idea to an actual video is not easy, the whole process took almost half a year because everything had to be done from scratch. First, the music had to be composed, after that the choreography. Denisa came up with the ballet choreography herself, she cooperated with her colleague Roman Gemrot on the pole dance choreography and she had special trainers for the two other dance styles.

“We wanted to create a video that would simply be awesome and unusual and I knew that collaborating with Madmenmedia and Dragonfly would be the best way to make it happen. For me as a dancer, this was a challenge, I had to learn dance styles I’ve never tried before, like Street dance and Twerk. I used to do ballet but a few years have passed since I last wore the pointe shoes so I had to brush up my skills,” says Denisa.

If you’ve seen the video, you have probably noticed there are some cool tricks. We asked Ondrej and Jiri to explain how it’s done, this is how they describe it: “We’ve used a technique called morphing to change the clothes and hairstyles. Although the change itself only takes a few seconds in the video, each of them takes around a week in the studio.” And what was the biggest challenge? “That has to be the stage. It’s a combination of morphing and 3D animation. We’ve taken one long shot with a moving camera of Denisa walking through where the stage will appear, building the stage and then of her walking back to do a pole trick.”

And one last interesting fact – the video was shot during the night and the dances were not in chronological order, but actually the other way around because of the physical difficulty of pole dance and also because of the changing clothes.

When we ask Denisa about the final result, it’s clear the hard work has paid off: “I’m fascinated by what the guys from Madmenmedia have created! I’m so glad I had the chance to present myself and my favourite pieces from Dragonfly in such a cool video. I hope the viewers like it as much as we do.”

We love the video as well and we want to know your opinion. Let us know in the comments what you think and don’t forget to follow Denisa on her Facebook and Instagram :).