Stay Home. Save Lives

So I did a thing. I have a bit of time on my hands these days and I really wanted to compose for a new project. So yesterday I thought, “hey why don’t I just make the video myself, compose to it, then also do the voice over.” So I put together a little PSA for staying home. #stayhome

I spent about a day and a half putting together the video and recording the music and narration. It was a pretty streamlined and quick process. My goal was to churn this out as quick as possible, as if I was on a tight deadline. It was a fun challenge and a meaningful way to contribute to the current stressful world. I have a lot of friends who are doing livestream concerts, but honestly, no one wants to watch me play guitar and sing emo songs.

Video Editing

Video editing is something I’ve had to do for work a lot of times over the years. I’m no pro, but I at least know my way around Premiere Pro at a baby level. Again, I’m an amateur, but this was a fun project to play around with.

I used some royalty free videos from Pexels.com and mixed them all together. I decided that the timing had to follow seconds, so the BPM would be 120. I knew that at the end I would do a faster build up, so I wanted nice steady tempo like 120.

First I had to look through what video footage was available, then the story fit to that. I had know idea how much would be available at first, but was shocked at the amazing footage out there that is free to use.

Scripting

While I was laying out the video, I was writing the script. I knew I would record the audio myself and I wanted it to be serious, short, and simple. I went with a standard PSA feel with an ending that is positive. It’s like one of those classic MasterCard commercials.

Things are a bit strange right now. There’s a lot of anxiety. It’s stressful. It’s lonely.

We miss our friends. We miss our families. We miss the lives that we worked so hard to build. But now they look to us, they look to you. We stay home today to ensure a safer tomorrow for everyone, because this won’t last forever.

We will dance together soon. We will play together. We will learn together. We will laugh and smile together. Then we’ll cheers together. So stay home and save lives.

Music

If you’ve read any of my other posts, you know I use Reaper as my DAW. For this project, I mostly used my new ASM Hydrasynth. This baby is incredible.

I love the patches on this. It’s got such a deep sound and so many variations. I’m playing tones while messing with each of the envelopes, delay, reverb, LFO’s, etc. It’s such a great learning tool for sound too.

There are probably 6+ different patches used in the music for this video.

I have a new studio set up these days and this was the first piece I wrote in this new set up. The only other “acoustic” instrument besides the Hydrasynth was some electric guitar work. I wanted to fatten the bass with some power chords, then I also added some screaming guitar that is very distorted. It’s following the chord progression, but really adds a nice ambiance to the whole piece.