Implementing the project
The first part of the project happened mostly on the phone. Melanie phoned me up during my art lessons and we talked. It went like this:
- Coming up with ideas
- Writing Lyrics
- Thinking about major or minor key
- Suggesting things for Melanie to play on her piano
- Suggesting changes to the music
- Writing emails to collaborators
- Watching the video recordings and sending feedback
After these things were done, we went back to school luckily and I could work on editing everything together.
Coming up with Ideas
I text my friends to ask them one thing they missed during lockdown. Melanie texted the teachers the same thing. This is the list:
- Lunch break at school
- Laptops
- Going to work
- PE
- My lessons
- Seeing my friends
- Christmas
Melanie asked me what advice I would give to my friends and teachers to make them feel better and I said:
- Be happy again
- You will survive
- Have patience
We decided together to call the song “We’ll Survive”. Melanie gve me the homework of writing the lyrics and this is what I wrote:
The Hard Part – Writing The Music
Rythm – How we did the rhythm was Melanie made sure I had my lyrics in front of me when I was on the phone. She asked me to read out each line and clap along and she wrote the rhythm down. If I was at school, we could have done something more complicated by we decided to do a repeated rhythm to make it easier that was:
LONG LONG SHORT SHORT LONG
Or in music words:
Crotchet Crotchet Quaver Quaver Crotchet
I didn’t have Sibelius but Melanie did so she write it down for me like this:
This rhythm repeats all the way through.
It was even harder to do the notes. I am not the best singer and I didn’t have a keyboard. Melanie sat on her piano, and she played a note and I told her to go up or down until we got the basic five notes of the verses:
Then
This took a very long time, but eventually we had a full piece of music. Melanie wrote it out on Sibelius and sent it to me.
To get the chords, we looked at the first note of every bar (bar one is a C) and chose a chord out of three possibilities (C could be C, F or G and I picked C). The second bar note is B natural which could have been B, G, or E minor , but I chose G. We went on like this for the whole song.
I did make a couple of changes. I made the note longer in the final bar and I changed the ryhthm in the chorus, but then it was done. We had to send it out and get all the parts, and I needed to learn the piano
The Final Piece of Music for Sharing
This piece of music has notes for instruments like the piano, it has chords for instruments like the guitar, and it has lyrics for singers.
Getting People Involved
It was important that people played at the same speed and pitch so I sent them this video to play along to. They could have this on headphones while they played. Melanie recorded this from Sibelius.
PASSWORD: TREASURE682
All the parts people sent back and my replies to them
I got sent back a lot of video parts. I stored them all in this Google Drive Folder. This is how me ane Melanie looked at them and commented while I was at home in lockdown:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VyOwYPJ0CaplzpY9J760SVTELQlrx06b?usp=sharing
My feedback to contributors:
Helen mention my song in the weekly email to staff, students, and parents
Improving my playing
I wanted to play the piano part in my song so I asked my school to arrange piano lessons. I worked with Fabienne to improve. We worked up to an end of term performance
My Performance:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PmVQkEtdU152SfqaxYTxLcIcxJgiqKQX/view?usp=sharing
Making it in Garage Band
It was hard to do this because some people didn’t play at the right speed so I did two sections like an introduction and the main song. I used iMovie to edit everything together. I used some clips that I videoed in the park next to the school to make it more interesting.
Trying to sync people up:
This link goes to an early draft: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TMZFTXIxOU4fAo8-sOt5_CsuGnTNUUdT/view?usp=sharing
Feedback from Melanie
Hi Cael, it looks like you are making progress with syncing the sound and the video parts in your final piece. I suggest that you carry on with the split screen as this works well, but you don’t need to have everyone on screen at once. How about just splitting the screen when a new voice is added? I think the clips from the park used as overlays look amazing!
Melanie