In Living Color Fly Girls Beatmatched Compilation

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• published: 30 Apr 2013
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An experiment I've always wanted to try: A long beatmatched sequence of In Living Color's Fly Girls (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Living_Color#The_Fly_Girls). The Fly Girls were choreographed by Rosie Perez in seasons 1-4 and had a unique style that showcased the rise of hip-hop in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I've always wanted to feature that in a nice video, so here it is. Among the dancers were a young Carrie-Ann Inaba and a young Jennifer Lopez. (For those short on time: You can see Carrie-Ann in the first clip and Jennifer in the second.) Jennifer Lopez joined right when Carrie-Ann was leaving the 3rd season, but there are a few clips with them together. Another dancer of note is Deidre Lang, who was the only dancer to stick with the show through all five seasons. Production Notes: The entire sequence starts at 104 BPM and ends at 120 BPM with an explosion. I beatmatched by hand and synced it by hand using Premiere Pro CS5 (I don't own any VJ software). I figured BPM by counting beats against time (I'm a musician) and sorting them into bins of 104, 106, 108, 110, 112, 114, 116, 118, and 120 BPM. (There were other bins as low as 96 and as high as 124 but these didn't get used in the main sequence.) Clips were chosen based on how much of the dancers they featured, the flow of the music, and how much I could use without credits or logos getting in the way (the point was to show off the dancers and choreography, not In Living Color itself). There are a LOT MORE fly girls clips in the entire series, but some danced to rap that didn't flow too well with the other clips so they weren't used. The clips in this video constitute less than half of all dancing in the series. Clips were only taken through season 4. In season 5, Rosie Perez was no longer the choreographer and I feel the dancing lost the hip-hop base that made the sequences so special. The clips are season 4-heavy because the Wayans had all but left the show by that point and there was less sketch material, so they compensated with more dancing. The sequences in season 4 are longer, more unbroken, and had less rap so they tended to fit better. Source material was not the best quality, sorry. Trivia: In season 4 they stretched a bit and starting reusing dance sequences from season 3 (for example, in S04E15 there is a sequence lifted from S03E18). I pulled off a few edits that seamlessly combined clips from 2 or even 3 seasons together because the music was the same, and the music and flow remains unbroken. Some of these edits are more clever than others; one or two are obvious, sorry. Some of the sequences show off a particularly *fierce* Ms. Lopez which may be a shock to those who only know her from her acting or singing careers. There is a male crew in a few sequences, but I don't know what their name is/was, sorry.