Unlike my other films, I did not have a clear picture of how Lajok: The Night Dancer would turn out. I had never directed a dancer, and I can’t dance or choreograph, and yet I would have to heavily rely on dance to tell the story. I was in very unfamiliar territory, I feared it would be a hit or miss, so I’m pleasantly surprised at the response the film got.
I first conceived of a feature film themed on night dancers around 2009, but I never fully developed it. I never get round to a first draft of the script, or even a treatment, for the technicalities, like filming exterior night scenes, were beyond my means. Yet the story keeps teasing me, anxious to be told, and so I decided to make a short film to figure out how to film day-for-night (DFN). And also motion capture (mocap) for I’ve struggled to animate humanoid movements. Both DFN and mocap are very useful skills to master, and now that I have a sense of how to achieve them, expect some more goodies from me soon.
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This is a bit of a long post, and so I’ve divided it into sections. Chapter 1 is about Hani and The Dance Choreography, while Chapter 2 revolves around creating the music, and Chapter 3 discusses the idea of the night dancer, if you want to know more about this mythology. In Chapter 3B, I discuss the old woman and her pet corpse, in light of most stories stating that night dancers are always men. The other parts are on technical matters, with Chapter 4 looking at the process of animation and mocap and Chapter 5 talking about the day-for-night filming. I’m making videos on all these topics, but so far only managed to finish the first three.
Hani and The Dance Choreography
Hani did not have much acting experience, but I chose her for I know how to work with beginner actors and non-actors; as long as they have a talent that I can utilize. From my very first films, like Under Sarah’s Bed, I’ve always worked with non-actors. A more notable film is, however, is one I made in 2017, titled No Letting Go (or How To Start A Zombie Apocalypse, I never quiet settled for a title for that film). I ran into a lady, Barbra, who told me she wanted to give acting a go, and I was like, I’m making this short film, you want to give it a shot? So she found herself in front of the camera. More recently, in Lanyonyo: The Metal Person, I worked with a troubled teenage girl to pull off the story.
The trick is in the editing, in knowing how to put two frames together to tell a story. So I can easily have them do something in one shot, and another thing in the next shot, and when I put the two shots together it makes sense. Something like that. So I trusted in my ability to help Hani to deliver, and I’m very happy with the comments about her performance.
The problem remained with the dance. I had no idea how to go about it. Neither did she. I at first wondered if we should get a choreographer, but then, I thought it would interfere with the storytelling for it was not just about creating moves. It was about evoking an emotion from the audience. Perhaps a choreographer might have understood the script and brought out a performance that would take the story to way higher places, but that choreographer would have to be a horror fan and to have an idea of how the genre worked, and I wasn’t sure I could get someone like that in Kampala.
When I discussed this with Hani, who happened to be a huge fan of horror, she too thought we could work out something without a choreographer. So we discussed the script, what happens in each scene, and how we could use the dance moves effectively.
Know more about Hani Mulungi in this video.
The biggest challenge was in the doll, which had to hypnotize her, and then she had imitate every move it makes. But the doll we opted for was made entirely of cloth, and it could not have the stiffness of human limbs. The moves had to be a little bit lethargic, a little bit wobbly.
For inspiration, I watched a lot of horror films in which dance played a key role, and the one that stood out was Lovecraft Country. The two dancing demons have haunted me since I first saw them, and I thought it would be worthwhile to examine how they pulled it off. What became obvious is that in Lovecraft Country, the demons distorted themselves into positions that a human would find very uncomfortable, even painful, and this informed the decisions we made.
Somehow, after the first rehearsal, it came to me that directing a dancer was not so different from director ordinary actors. I would allow her to come up with a move on her own, and then I’d give her feedback, ask her to improve this or that, or, in the case of the body-distorting moves, push herself as far as she could go, and I’m glad she was a very easy person to work with.
Making The Music with Mudasi
I had to create the music for this film from scratch. Normally, I pick royalty free music off the internet, from sites like incompetech.com, which I’ve used since 2006 (I’m forever thankful for Kevin McLeod for making such a large and diverse collection of music freely available to filmmakers like me). But it would be difficult to use pre-made music in The Night Dancer.
At first, I worked with a fellow writer, Mandisi Nkomo, with whom I started discussing this film in 2021. He is a drummer and he created the first beats that gave us an entry point into the rehearsal, but there was a big challenge. He was in South Africa and we were in Uganda, and as we rehearsed the moves on day one, it became obvious that we needed to come up with the drumbeats in real time. Sticking to pre-recorded music would confine Hani’s ability to create moves on impluse. I tried to edit the music we had on the go. I remixed the beats to create something new, I slowed the beats here and there, all trying to give Hani something to work with. It did not work.
Get to know more about Mudasi in this video.
So I looked around Kampala for percussionists and came upon Mudasi, who seemed to be the easiest to work with. He was a bit frustrated in the beginning since we already had a certain beat in our heads. Still, once he got a feel of the project, his input became invaluable. He has an extensive knowledge of the night dancer lore and he advised us on the night dance moves. I always wondered what strokes night dancers make, and he suggested it would not be very different from the culture they lived in. If it were a lajok (from Acholi) they would dance something similar to any of the many Acholi dances. If it were a musezi (from Buganda and other Bantu people) it would be the dance most common in their area. The music too would not be too far different from what they heard in their day-to-day lives. This theory helped us overcome some of the creative problems we were having.
In the story, our night dancer lives in Kampala and is a modern person, and so the dance took a new shape, a mix of contemporary and traditional moves. Hani borrowed from dances all over the country, from Acholi, Tooro, Buganda, Busoga, and from Hiphop and contemporary genres, to create her final pieces.
My favourite dance in the film is tamena ibuga, from Busoga, and an entertainment dance where you dodge the gourds of alcohol scattered around the ground. It was a fitting dance to do after the capture of the night dancer, because it had a forward movement action, and because the beats that accompanied it could be synced with whips, and I wanted a fun dance where the bad guy is getting whipped.
Myths And Legends About The Night Dancers
I wrote a bit about this here and since then I’ve learned more about them from different cultures and gotten a clearer understanding of the subject, so this will correct some errors I made in that post.
The story revolves around the myth of the night dancer, which widespread in Uganda, and each culture has its own definition and characteristics. They are collectively called ‘night dancer’ in English. The most common name for them are abasezi (singular is musezi; other spelling is basezi, omusezi). The basezi of Busoga are said to walk on their heads with their legs up in the air. In the Acholi, they are called ‘latal’. The la prefix means ‘person of’ and tal is the act of causing death by withering or wasting away, according to Okot p’Bitek, in Religion of the Central Luo, which appears in Lawino’s People (2018). His description of a latal fits that of a night dancer, as he writes that the latal “left his house when everybody else had gone to bed. He was stark naked, but he powdered himself with ash from the kitchen stove, so that he looked whitish. When he met someone on the pathway he hissed like a python. He danced around the house of a person where witchcraft took him.” (p.481, Lawino’s People). I could have called the film Latal: The Night Dancer, but I opted for Lajok, which p’Bitek says is the overall term for these kinds of people, so latal is a form of lajok. I grew up in Tororo, where the night dancer is called jajwok, and so I always think of them as such, rather than latal.
According to the Jopadhola, the best way to fight a night dancer is to plant razor blades or other sharp objects on your doorway, because the jajwok rubs their naked butts on doors, smearing shit to bewitch you. A good way to know a night dancer, then, is to find someone seeking treatment for wounds on their butts. Other people say you leave your door open, and when the night dancer comes dancing against it, the door swings open and you capture them. Though among the Acholi, when a night dancer is at work, you’ll be under a spell and hypnotized, and so unable to do anything, though you can hear him dancing.
There are many kinds of night dancers. Some are just a nuisance in the villages, disturbing the sleep of other people. Most are known to curse and cause bad luck. The most popular stories are about those who eat the dead. Whenever I see zombie films, I chuckle thinking that the best way to fight zombies is to use basezi…. But no, they don’t eat the rotting type. They feast on the ‘fresh’ type. Some say they use their powers (or magic, for lack of a better word) to kill a person, and then preserve the corpse in the grave until they resurrect it for a feast. It’s not unusual to see mainstream news stories of graves that have been dug up shortly after a burial. The assumption is always that abasezi were at work. The night dancers have a network. They know each other. When a person dies in a village, the night dancers in that village won’t eat him, for there is taboo to eat your own dead. They send word to other night dancers to come and feast, even if that person was their close relative, and it’s a kind of loan, knowing that other night dancers would invite them to pick up corpses from other villages.
Some night dancers make the dead to leave the grave and do chores for them. In this film, the heroine summons the help of anati to revenge. Anati is a zombie that is used to work in a garden, or do other chores, but the anati can also make a human being leave their bed to farm for whoever controls it. The human will wake up in the morning feeling very exhausted, perhaps even with mud on their feet and hands, then they will know that anati made them dig all night.
The Night Dancers Are Always Men
In most cases, the persons accused of being night dancers are mainly men, and it is believed that they inherit it from their fathers, that a father “blows” it into his son’s anus to give him the powers, according to p’Bitek. “A boy inherited witchcraft from his father as he might also inherit his tallness or hot temper… They said of him ‘Okwanyo jok pa wonne’, ‘He has inherited his father’s witchcraft’; or ‘Lukutujok itere’, ‘Witchcraft has been blown into his anus’. (p.479, Lawino’s People)
The stories we often hear involve a woman marrying a man, and discovering that he is a night dancer. p’Bitek writes that “A girl in Bwobo reported to her mother that she was in bed with her lover. When she woke up in the middle of the night her lover had swollen up to twice his normal size and was breathing heavily. After some time he became deflated again to his normal size, and he got up and went outside completely naked, and began to dance the tal dance around the house.” (p.480)
In the film, the bad guy is a man. He has a drum, but this was my invention for they dance without drums or music of any kind. I’m not making a documentary, or an anthropological film, and I wanted to practice motion capture, so I thought of this night dancer using the drum to awake the doll, which then hypnotizes the main character, in allusion to the anati.
I thought of the film as a revenge fantasy, so while the bad man uses dance to do evil, the main character learns a more powerful dance from an old woman for revenge. The old woman’s back story, which I intend to explore in a short story (I should make time to write that!) or perhaps a novella, is that she got married to a night dancer, unknowingly, or perhaps she inherited these powers from her father, who did not have a son and so he ‘blew into her anus’ to pass down the family traits. She managed to control the evil powers rather than succumb to them, and she never quiet figured out how to use it for good, until she found a victim of rape, thrown into the bushes like a dog and left to die. Perhaps in the novella the old woman and the young woman will team up to go after the evil group that sold the bad magic to the man. You might notice this group in many of my short films. I call them The Clique of Jilted Hearts.
Motion Capture Nightmares
I wrote this script to learn motion capture. I’d just completed my first commissioned TV series and so had some loose cash lying around and I thought I’d buy a mocap suit. The one from Rokoko was affordable and a lot of animators were posting about it on social media. So I bought one. It turned out to be a complete waste of money. The first time I made such a bad decision was with a camera I bought around 2007, which I never used on any meaningful project other than to shoot a few pointless clips, mostly because it was a canon, and it recorded videos in a format that nobody else in Uganda used, as everyone preferred Sony camcorders. At least that camera did not cost an arm and a leg.
The Rokoko nightmares started when the suit arrived, via DHL, who classified it as a cloth rather than an electronic equipment, and so it incurred a heavy tax, over half the price of the suit. I cried, but there was nothing I could do. I tried to use the suit, and the problems mounted. I now realized that everyone who had posted about the suit was influencing for Rokoko. They either got free suits, or had referral deals. I bought mine from a YouTuber who had a 10% discount code. So what they said about the suit wasn’t entirely accurate.
An online search revealed that many people had the same complaints about the Rokoko suit, many cursed ever buying it. My entry into mocap wasn’t going to be smooth. Soon after getting it, other projects distracted me, and so I shelved the suit, dutifully following the Rokoko guide, from 2021 to mid this year. Then, I tried the suit around May 2025. It seemed to work just fine. A few weeks later, after Hani had figured out her moves, I decided to give the suit a test, and then, it just could not work.
Worse, the cables showed signs of wear, the rubbers peeling off, yet it had just sat in my wardrobe all this time without me even touching it! Shucks! I gave up on the suit. Perhaps Rokoko 2.0 is a better experience, but I couldn’t be bothered. Rokoko as a company isn’t nice. They enshittified, and stopped supporting the Smart Suit 1.0, urging us to ditch all the money we have already spent and instead buy a new suit. Idiots.
I didn’t want to use AI, or anything with that label, for motion capture. Shortly after I bought the suit, the AI madness started, and suddenly there were tools for markerless mocap. I did not need a suit or special sensors to capture motion. Only a video. Recently I found a new product that did not use the AI label, and it is an open-source project called freemocap. The best part, I could install and run it on my local machine rather than use it on a cloud.
But installing freemocap was a nightmare. I got it to work on my laptop, but not on my workstation. Also, the results were more of a pain than helpful. If I was capturing slow movements, it might have worked. But I was capturing very fast and energetic dance moves, and the actress distorted her body into strange positions that the tool could not understand, and so it gave me useless results. I dumped it as well. Perhaps I’ll use it in future, for animation that does not require very fast and complicated motion, and perhaps by then they’d have figured out a more user-friendly way to distribute it.
The only option I had left was to hand animate the doll. I pulled up videos of Hani dancing and used them as reference. It was a slow process, but it gave me the best results. Of course, given the amount of work involved, and seeing that I had to move on to other projects, I cut down a lot on the shots I needed. I always write my films so that the story does not rely entirely on CGI to work, so I removed a lot of VFX shots from The Night Dancer without ruining the story. Instead, the story came out shorter, and punchier. If I’d failed to animate the doll, I could have filmed a human against a green screen and composited them in place of the doll.
Filming Day-for-Night
The film is set at night and there was no way to shoot after sunset, not just because we did not have the equipment that could work wonders in very low light. Filming exterior night scenes poses a logistic horror. I had to shoot it during daytime and color grade it to look like night.
I bought a day-for-night filter, but I did not need it. It was not totally a waste of money, for it helped cut down the daylight and create a blue effect, but the techniques I eventually used proved that I did not need a filter. It was a lot of grading trial and error, and I went through very many tricks from many online tutorials. Some were easy, like the match shot, but the results were not very useable. When I made my first cut, I couldn’t see anything, and I feared no one would see Hani’s moves.
I always wondered how they pulled it off in Mad Max: Fury Road, and after an extensive search I finally found answers in this tutorial. The person behind it appears to have talked to the colorist of the Mad Max film, and so his advice was what I was looking for. It gave the night scenes a cinematic look, rather than realistic, but at least the audience can see all of Hani’s dance moves.