Roles: Co-Director, Background Projection Artist
After over a year of creating virtual choir videos due to COVID, I was well versed in the production process of gathering audio, editing audio, and gathering footage, editing footage. However, 99% of all virtual choir videos being produced followed the same format - rectangular blocks of people lined up in a grid, possibly with a colorful or stock video background, possible with different formations throughout.
I wanted to break this mold.
I loved the idea of having people overlap with each other, "interacting" on-screen from thousands of miles away, and drew up some example sketches of how this could look.
We had been scouring the internet for different virtual choir videos, music videos, and video techniques that would make our virtual choir video more visually interesting. It was around this time that my co-director, Yu Hang, found this music video, based on projecting images onto the singers: 家 Home (National Day Singapore) - The Apex Project
We loved this concept, but decided that instead of random city footage, we would project singers, and footage of the singer's homes that they took themselves. I drew up some mockups of how that might look with stock images, and images of Yu Hang.
The first step of actually creating the music video was getting the background projection video done. Once I received the raw footage from the singers, I was able to create both some pencil sketches and Adobe Premiere Pro mockups to discuss placement and style with Yu Hang.
Once we settled on the overlapped, "outside of the box," style, I was able to complete the video by designing layouts for sections of the song, and editing the footage accordingly. Across the world, Yu Hang was able to film and edit the main video from his own home, and we decided that using another conductor's handwriting would be a great personal touch for the video's text. My favorite part might actually be the credits at the end, as I suggested that projecting the credits instead of transitioning to digital images would complete the aesthetic of the video, and the little shadow puppets would add a playful touch alongside our choir "bloopers."
