So You Wanna Be A Dancer!

 

"Tonight, and the Rest of my Life - Nina Gordon."
Premiered with DX on 4/21/18

I have been dancing in SL for 9 years now, and directed almost as long.  I keep what I do anally organized and I want to share with you some of the things I do to make things easier for me when preparing to build a dance, and keeping costumes organized for upcoming shows.  If  you're new to the world of dance I hope the things I share moving forward will be helpful to you.

One of the things a director relies on is the ability of the dancer to accessorize their costuming, and to do split second costume changes at show time.  So being organized is essentially important.  

I keep all of my costumes for dances in my appearance folder.  If you don't know what this is, right click around your toolbar and go into the toolbar buttons.  Look for this....

Once you've found it, drag it to one of the edges of your monitor and drop it.  Now you have easy access to all of your saved outfits!

Appearance may look different in other skins.

When I put a costume together I don't use the same head/body I use for every day wear.  I make a copy of them and put them in their own special folder - that way I have a blank copy of Dejaye when putting my costumes together.  I can change up her makeup, make body alterations when needed, and by saving the outfit I always have it because we run a dance more than one time.  

In my folder I have the things that I want Dejaye to have with each costume:

My "Dance Body" folder.
This is Dejaye naked with no hair.

So this folder has everything I want Dejaye to wear for each of her dances.  Every time I have a new costume to put together I make a copy of this folder and paste it in the main folder for the dance.  Doing it this way is so much easier when putting a costume together.

So once you've completed your ensemble, save it to your appearance and forget about it.  If the dance is on the schedule again you don't have to do anything to prepare for it unless you want to upgrade your looks which you can do via the appearance folder with the button "Save Changes."

Easy peasy!  If you want to minimize the amount of outfits in your appearance folder and want to save the costume, simply go into your Inventory and find the Outfits folder, open another inventory window and look for the folder with the costume for that dance, then just drag it over.  You can always drag it back when doing the dance again.  

Feel free to contact me in world if you have any questions, I'm more than happy to help! 😁👍