Update April 2020: Choreo App is now live on the internet! Check out Choreo.
About Choreo. Choreo is a simple clickable icon arrangement application which allows dance choreographers or cover groups to organize people into formations. Features include the ability to upload and download sets of formations, cycle through formations to get a high-level sense of a dance, and data persistence if you accidentally close the application.
An example of what a choreography formation slide deck looked like
Before Choreo. Before I made the Choreo app, I used Powerpoint/Keynote/Similar Apps to make similar formation diagrams. These offered a lot of great features for what I wanted. Slides were a really intuitive way to capture formations and going back and forth between them with the up and down arrow key was easy. I could copy a previous formation to create a new one, which was helpful because often times a new formation doesn’t radically change where people are. I could also put a new formation between two already created formations if I realized an intermediate step would be helpful for helping people find which paths they should be walking. Lastly, this was better than similar things I’d used on paper (like what marching bands use), since it didn’t create any paper waste, didn’t have to be carried around, and I could edit it at any time and send out a new link for people to take home. These features were things I wanted to keep when I created this app, but there were some problems I also needed to solve.
Why Choreo. For most cases where I used Powerpoint, I had 10-12 people in a dance. This meant 10-12 icons per slide, plus their labels. This made Powerpoint run incredibly slow, since the icons weren’t really made for that. Another struggle was that sometimes the way dancers move through space wasn’t linear, so you would have a transition between formations where one person would take a curved path and the icons wouldn’t remember their identities between slides, so you couldn’t animate these non-intuitive routes. I also wanted collision (or near collision) detection during transitions. At present, I’ve solved the first problem (the choreo app is specifically built for this use case, so it’s very fast), and since the icons maintain their identities between formations, it will be pretty straightforward to handle the future use-cases I foresee.
Choreo’s current user interface
Next for Choreo. I want to do a lot of user-interface cleanup for this app, to make it prettier. Additionally, adding in some color selection for the icons to make them more visually distinct. The next big project will be in making transitions easier, with the ability to select different styles for icons to get between one formation and the next. This needs to be very customizable! Since formations are snapshots of dances, they don’t usually capture things like movement quality or the ‘feel’ of a dance, but transitions can be really unique, so I want to be able to capture the different ways people run, walk, frolic, crawl, or trudge across a stage. I already mentioned that I want to add collision detection and ‘smart-routing’. Sometimes I visualize where I want people to be after a transition, but putting it into space often involves a lot of complications: Who walks in front of who? Can a person actually make it across a stage in four counts while looking calm? It would be nice for the software to highlight that. And speaking of timing, a feature I want to eventually add is the ability to add music to match the formations with time-stamps, and then the transitions with the song. With these features, I feel I will have the ability to really visualize a dance before trying to bring it to life.