High Strung

High Strung is a 2016 American dance drama directed by Michael Damian and co-written with Janeen Damian. Keenan Kampa stars as Ruby Adams, a Midwestern ballet student on scholarship at a Manhattan conservatory, and Nicholas Galitzine as Johnnie, an English violinist busking in the subway; the two join a hip-hop crew for a high-stakes competition. Jane Seymour and Sonoya Mizuno co-star, and Paladin released the film in April 2016.

Dance pictures ask visual effects to stay entirely out of sight. What matters here is rotoscoping and cleanup — erasing camera rigs, safety cables, crew reflections and track marks from long choreographed takes — together with digital set extension and matte painting to open up theatre interiors and subway platforms beyond the space a shoot can hold, plus compositing that stitches several performance takes into one unbroken routine. Screen inserts and crowd augmentation fill out the rest of the toolkit. Terminal FX contributed visual effects and animation to High Strung, one of the titles in the studio’s film, television and commercial portfolio.