By now a few of my friends, and the occasional visitor to this site, will understand that I like to sing. I am a performance junkie and will walk up to the stage on any ‘open mike’ night or sing karaoke at the slightest suggestion of a melody on the wind…
Any excuse to sing.
School musical performance 1979
I had the chance to perform in some very amateur music theatre at school and have been able to crash more than a few band stages with some impromptu singing ever since.
Yet, after its first big stage release to the world in 1985, I always wanted to have a crack at singing the Les Miserables iconic piece ‘Stars’. Many people believe it was best performed by Philip Quast, who then truly immortalised it with his performance at the 10th year anniversary concert featuring ‘the dream cast’, live on stage at the Royal Albert hall in 1995.
I had some time on my hands back in August and found myself house sitting for a friend, in a house that has some amazing natural acoustics. Because of this, I decided to have a go at making a voice recording of Stars. The result was better than I had expected and so I considered going all out and making another music video.
Yet I faced a challenge. I had already made three amateur music video’s and to avoid the risk of getting into a predictable rut, I felt that I needed to produce something visually very different.
Great stairwell acoustics.
One of the great features of iMovie is the ability to manipulate the appearance of MP4 files. I was already familiar with some of these features and had come across what is called the ‘comic’ set of filters. As I mulled over new ideas, I was reminded of the 1985 hit ‘Take on me‘ by A-ha which was, I thought, innovative and really ahead of the game, especially with its comic book story line. So with that thought, here were the seeds of a new idea. But how to make the actual video different from everything else I had come up with so far?
The house I was looking after was a three story, free standing building with a wooden stair case leading up to the top floor, and simple wrought iron railing features on balconies and stair banisters. This had some great potential, but I wasn’t quite sure what.
Then I remembered the original musical. Jean Valjean is a fugitive who evades capture by Inspector Javert for years. Javert never quite catches up with him until, when trying to create a ruse, Javert is caught and exposed to his revolutionary captors by the boy Gavroche, only to be granted his freedom by Valjean. He then has crisis of conscience and jumps off a bridge (see the picture at the top of this article). That’s a very simple and rough summation.
A little support from Denon.
Back to the music video. As mentioned above, the house had some potential to deliver with imagery including heights, bars, shadows and silhouettes. Some decent material for the creation of a concept. I took lots of photos on sunny afternoons and captured a few great moods, but it wasn’t enough for a whole video. Then I played with the idea of somehow including ‘the fugitive’ and captured moving shadows in the late afternoon. Still not enough though. Then came the idea of a quiet and passive pursuit, which turned into climbing the stairs. Still not enough. And finally, Bingo! Change the whole thing to black and white and add the ‘Classic Comic’ filter. Done. I was happy with that result.
The voice recording was remarkably simple to make. I came across a fantastic concert music score on YouTube, minus the vocals of course, which I played through Clive’s great Denon sound system, then simply recorded on my iPhone 11. The result was pretty near perfect. I then recorded the vocals in one take with the help of a tripod placed in the stairwell. After a couple of tweaks it was finished.
While the video itself is fairly simple, in my mind it’s the best effort I have made so far with vocals, and considering these video’s are basically created just for my family, I’m pretty happy with the overall result. If you want to have a listen, click here.
So, let’s see what comes next.
