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Musical Visions
Music written by and video shot by by Fremont Unified School District 6th graders, arranged into a short musical and video presentation. Music arranged by Jeff Beal, video edited by Jeremy Knight.
The Muscial Visions video was presented at a Fremont Symphony Orchestra concert on March 30, 2014, with the orchestra providing the sound track. It was sponsored by a $40,000 grant from the Creative Work Fund. $10,000 went to the arranger, who orchestrated themes submitted by elementary school student composers, $10,000 to me, the video artist, who edited the children's short clips into coherent form, and the remainder to Fremont Symphony Orchestra. FSO fundraised an additional $15,000 for the project.
We purchased some small HD cameras for the kids to use. Ultimately, 10 of the district's 28 elementary schools decided to participate. I met with students and teachers at each school, described the goals of the project, passed out the cameras, and gave some basic instructions on how to use them.
I ended up with about 40 submissions of videos for the six compositions. It turns out 6th graders aren't inspired by slow music — the three slow pieces got far fewer submissions than the three fast ones. Many of the kids shot their videos on cameras other than the ones we gave the schools. It was quite a challenge to get all the different video formats working in my editing program.
I really enjoyed working with the dedicated teachers and the energetic kids. Two of the schools formed video clubs after working on the project, so maybe there will be some lasting effect.
At my insistence, there was a preview showing of the video at the 2014 Children's Concert (contrary to the statement on the FSO web excerpt below). I wish I could post the final video, but various impediments arose. It turns out the Musicians' Union does not want the orchestra's work to be distributed without high royalty payments — I ended up making DVDs of the video for each school with royalty-free replacement music. I'm also reluctant to violate the privacy of the students by posting even that video. So you'll have to be content with the frame-grabs below.
From the Fremont Symphony Orchestra website:
The Fremont Symphony Orchestra (FSO) in collaboration with the Fremont Unified School District, Composer Jeff Beal and Videographer Jeremy Knight present "Musical Visions."
The Fremont Symphony Orchestra has always believed that engaging children in the creation of art is one of the best ways to cultivate an appreciation of art in growing generations. Since I976, the FSO’s Young Composer’s Competition has been the orchestra’s primary method of fostering this sort of engagement. For its 5Oth anniversary season, the orchestra wishes to build on this idea by engaging even more school children through a different medium: that of videography.
The FSO’s 5Oth Anniversary Project begins with musical works created by Fremont school children, and asks current 6th grade elementary school students to respond to these pieces by creating short videos that are inspired by what they hear in the music. Both the original musical pieces the subsequent videos will be used by two professional artists, composer Jeff Beal (Monk, Ugly Betty, House of Cards, HBO Rome Series) and videographer Jeremy Knight, to create a new multi-media work which celebrates the FSO’s legacy of inspiring children to be involved in the creation of art.
The FSO believes that this sort of project, involving multiple layers of collaboration, will show the elementary school students just how varied and rich the artistic process can be, as well as suggest to them new ways of appreciating orchestral music. The FSO believes that this insight is particularly valuable in today’s multi-media world.
To limit the amount of video submitted to Jeremy, the amount of video footage submitted will be limited to only 5 minutes per student and 1 hour maximum from each school. That means 12 kids from each school can be chosen to submit 5 minutes of video each. Jeremy will visit the schools to brief the kids. All the 6th graders in any one school can meet in the same assembly, so Jeremy could talk to all of them at once. The schools will have to work out how to limit the number of kids who participate, or find a way to select the 12 best videos from each school.
The final musical work, written for full orchestra, will be 15-20 minutes in length and will be accompanied by video montage. Both the orchestral and video works will be unique creations of the two professional artists, but will draw on the raw materials created by the Fremont students. The final "Musical Visions" multi-media work will be presented at the 50th Season event in May 2014 FSO concerts and repeated at the March 2015 at Children’s Concerts.
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