How Dance has been edited.

I was watching the movie Step Up the other night and it reminded me of something I noticed earlier.

I went to see White Christmas at the Hyland during the Holidays. It was pretty cool to see it on film on the big screen. One thing that struck me was the musical numbers. They were shot pretty much live in only a few cuts. The actors had to actually be able to dance! Modern films have dance scenes edited out of dozens or more small segments. In general the new dances are more complicated but still, seems a bit of a cheat.

Here's a scene from White Christmas, notice how few cuts there are between camera shots.




Here's a scene from Step Up. Notice how often there are cuts even in the fairly simple moves at the beginning. It's kind of a shame, you can see from earlier parts of the film that Channing Tatum and the others are actually good dancers. I wonder if they could film a dance scene the same way as White Chrtistmas?