While writing a story about Hulu’s new dance show, The LXD, for Mashable, I spoke with two lead choreographers, Harry Shum Jr. and Chris Scott. Over the course of an hour we spoke about how the show was using the online space, some of the troubles filming for the small screen and what they hoped to achieve with the show.
Of all the things we talked about, only a small portion of it actually made it into the story. I’ve gone back through the transcripts to dig out some choice quotes from that interview for anyone looking to get more insight into the show or the minds of the choreographers.
Note: Stay tuned for an interview with LXD and Step Up director Jon M. Chu.
Q: How is shooting these episodes on such a tight schedule? Is guerilla video-making intrinsic to any web series or is there a way to slow down the process?
Harry: I think we’d like to have both. There are certain [episodes] we look at and we’re like, “Ok, we’re going to need a little more time.”
We always tell our producers, “Please, give us one more day on this episode,” because usually we shoot an episode in one day (sometimes not even a full day). But also at the same time I think that’s also when you get some awesome things, like, the last episode that Jon (M. Chu) did, the finale, we literally shot probably about… a whole day of filming would usually take about two hours to do.
But with the talent we have, they don’t get frustrated, they’re like, “Ok, this is what we gotta do,” and they’re able to put the show on. And when you look at the footage it’s like, “Wow, this turned out really good.”
I mean, there’s a good side of it aside from having a heart attack at the end of the day.
Chris: Whenever we’re done, we finish a round of shooting and we look back and like, I can’t believe we just did that and we always just have that.
Harry: Every time.
Chris: If we can do it like this, we can do it on anything. We can make anything work.
Speaking about their personal motivation:
Chris: We really want to show how beautiful street dancing is because I kind of feel like sometimes it’s overlooked as a “beautiful” dance whereas contemporary is so beautiful and street dancing is just cool. It’s like a “cool” dance.
Q: How do you find talent, what’s it like working with the team, and what’s been the casting process for the show?
Chris: There’s kind of two ways that it works, either we write the character for a specific talent or we get a script and we go and find these pople who, most of the time, we know.
Harry: We’ve never really held an audition and what’s great is you know a guy’s name, you hear about him, people talk about him, you go online and then you’re able to see all his stuff and you go, “Oh yeah, we like him,” or “We’re iffy about him,” or “This one doesn’t work for this character,” but what’s great is you just hop on a computer and look at these guys talent and see if it works and I think that’s what’s great about the digital age. People can put their stuff up and you never know who’s looking at your stuff and that’s how we found a lot of these guys
Chris: Some of these guys have very specific looks so [auditioning for mainstream shows] is tough for them. We have a platform where that doesn’t matter. It’s about their abilities. Any looks, any age.
You could be 50 years old and you’re not going to book the next Usher tour, but you can come and be a part of what we do because there are no limits to what we do.
Chris: One of the coolest moments for me is when an older gentleman, who’s not really are demographic, he just stops me and I was wearing an LXD t-shirt and he stopped me and he was like, “Hey, I just randomly saw this on Hulu. It’s amazing what you guys are doing, I never seen you dance like that.”
And you know it’s so cool because he’s not a dancer, he’s never really been into dance, he’s a business man and this is just something that he just stumbled upon because it was on Hulu and it was free.
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