Today we’d like to introduce you to Daniel Zhu.
Hi Daniel, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I started my production company, Stance Elements, in 2014 with friends in Los Angeles. https://www.stanceelements.com/ Our passion was to capture and document the hip hop dance culture. Being former dancers ourselves, we wanted to portray the scene as grew up in, which is different than what you see in pop culture film and television.
Fast forward almost a decade, hip hop dance has grown exponentially. Breaking is in the Paris 2024 Olympics, the majority of social media content is dance related, and there are so many events around the world. I am very grateful to be in the right position and time for all of this.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
It’s been a challenging road. We showcase a lot of our content on social media, and it’s been popular. Working in social media comes lots of emotions: happy, stressed, inspired, insecure, drained, etc. It has not been easy. The more popular a page gets, the more responsibilities get added. But as long as we keep learning as individuals and keep a forward-moving mindset, everything turns out fine. A friend of mine had a really good motto, “always a student.” I think that speaks well to our position in that we are always striving to do the best we can at our craft, keep a humble mindset, and we should keep learning from others to improve.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
My company Stance Elements, we focus on the art of movement. That involves dance, tricking, stunts, martial arts, basically anything physical that has an artistic side. However, in recent years, we have been showing much more dance than anything because Breaking (breakdance) has been announced for the Paris 2024 Olympics. That is so historic!
And this year, we finished a 5 episode feature documentary for the Olympics.com highlighting breaking in various countries around the world. The first-ever official documentaries for the Olympics on breaking. https://olympics.com/en/news/breaking-life-olympic-channel-new-series-watch-now
What sets Stance apart from other production companies is that we are fully engrained into the dance scene. Having been former dancers ourselves, we’ve known our subjects before we became filmmakers. Some for more than 20+ years. With that knowledge, we have the trust of dancers to know what angles to correctly film them, as well how to tell their life stories. Because of this, our clients include Olympics, Red Bull, Monster, Snipes, Vans, Adidas, and more. Dancers and clients trust us to showcase dance culture.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
“Luck” is a strange word because it leaves things to chance which I try not to do. However, I do believe in positioning yourself in the best situations that can give you the most opportunities.
For example, every year new social media trends occur. Take time to study them, study both the technical and creative formats, and you’ll be in a better position to succeed online. That is much better than “getting lucky” and hoping a video goes viral. And if a video does go viral, take time to understand why so you can have similar success in the future. Ask yourself: When was this uploaded? What content was this? Did I film it in a different way? How was the audio? If I do this again, what can I do to get even more viewers?
In my field, there’s many dance social media pages. But ours has considerable reach and organic growth. It stands out. Take the time to understand your content. And as I said before, “always a student.”
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.stanceelements.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stanceelements/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stanceelements
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/stance
Image Credits
Kien Quan Jennifer Whalen
