I re-sang Dancing Fever in Spanish — Fiebre de Baile. The original is in English, so this time the move was English to Spanish rather than out of Korean.
This was a song that people in Latin America took to, back on a YouTube channel I used to run. That channel is gone now. Putting it up again on the current one does not bring back what happened then. I kept thinking about that time anyway, so I wanted to give the song back to them in Spanish, late as it is.
Starting with the problem: this is a dance track, and not one person dances in the video. AI cannot draw a body in mid-dance. Limbs smear, fingers come out in the wrong number. I tried a few times and gave up.
So I drew the heat with other things. Shadows thrown on a wall, feet seen only from the knee down, dust lifting off packed earth, a string of bulbs swinging over a square. It never shows the dancers, only the place where the dancing is happening. That felt better than forcing something the tool cannot do.
I also left out a main character. Faces still turn into a different person the moment the shot changes, and that is not solved yet. If you cannot win, go around. What the film follows is not a person but a place and a time. It opens on an Andean ridge at dawn, passes a market, laundry on a balcony, a wall changing colour as the sun drops, a square at night, and comes back to dawn. It is one day.
The thing I was most careful about was cliché. Flamenco dresses, wide-brimmed hats, cacti, skull make-up — none of it is in there. It would have been the easy route, but that is not a place I know, it is a place I have seen on a postcard. What went in instead: the bulbs, plastic chairs pushed back and left empty, a dog lying in the shade.
There were failures. I asked for "shadows dancing on a wall" and got the shadows of people commuting to work with backpacks on. Two separate shots made the same mistake. The word "dancing" was not enough; I had to write "arms lifted" before it appeared. The shot where a salt flat mirrors the whole sky took three attempts. Six of the forty-one shots were remade.
I nearly missed something on the audio side too. The finished cut came out sixteen seconds shorter than the original, because the backing track and the new vocal were at different sample rates. My ear did not catch it. The duration number did.
The original is on the channel as well. I do not know whether this reaches the people who listened back then, but tell me whether a dance song that never shows the dance actually works.