I already respected people who had to move their jobs from the classroom, the business, or the church to the makeshift video production room – the hallway, the bathroom, the basement.
We looked on as our kids’ teachers scrambled – seemingly seamlessly on our end – to create online math and chemistry lessons when everything switched so unexpectedly in March. We were amazed at their poise on camera, their ability to go from looking at humans to looking at lenses, and their rapidly acquired production capabilities.
We watched our church do the same thing, as the pastors, music director, and techies went into high gear and late nights to make the transition happen swiftly, quadrupling their tech knowledge out of time-crunched necessity – again, with what looked like such finesse from our side of things.
When it’s your turn to give it a go – WOW – you get a real taste of the utterly time-consuming endurance required to make even the simplest of videos. And we didn’t even have to do any compiling or editing on our end.
Here’s what I mean…
Our church asked anyone interested to join in a virtual Christmas choir for our Christmas Eve service. You’ve seen them by now – multiple screens of individuals singing, combined to look like a choral version of Hollywood Squares on steroids. All that was needed was a recording of each person singing “O Holy Night” and a few verses of “Silent Night.”
We began around 4 PM on Friday afternoon, and what do you know? We didn’t wrap it up until 1 AM! I’m not talking about time spent on technical perfection. We just barely concluded with semi-usable material!
No, we weren’t going take after take because we’re lens-loving divas (or divos). Quite the opposite; it took some getting used to just to see ourselves singing and record our unpolished voices one at a time in our small house!
We realized right away that for technical reasons, we wouldn’t be able to sing together as a family. We would need to record ourselves individually.
What happens is that with each take, some learning lesson arises. You listen to the leader’s recorded version through earphones so that when you sing along, you aren’t also recording their recording and causing echo-y reverb distortion. Or whatever you call it. But then you realize that your son’s modern earphones with a microphone actually don’t record you as well as singing loudly at the computer while wearing your old yellow Walkman earphones from the 1990s. It’s probably just user error, but your tech-savvy progeny is at the church helping produce another service and you can’t ask his advice. So you start over, this time with the Walkman earphones.
You press record and begin the song. Oh gosh – you picked the wrong octave. Partway through it, you can’t hit the low note. You start over.
Ever-optimistically, you begin again in the higher octave before pressing record – this time you’ll figure it out before staring at a lens. One more try and it’ll be a wrap. Uh oh. That’s not a good octave either! Oh well. It’s a choir, right? The other people will make up for what you lack.
You press record and begin again. You think you’re doing well until a family member quietly comes over and stops the recording. “Sorry,” they say gently, “it just didn’t sound as good as before.”
Okay, you’ve got all night. No problem, right? You make it through the entire song on the next round, excited to conclude your half of the production. Then you press play and watch the result. Ugggh. You look like a deer in the headlights. You’re not supposed to look like a frightened shepherd, you’re supposed to look like a warm, cozy singer sitting by your Christmas tree, looking joyous and loving as if your extended family were all gathered around in song. You aim to smile more, and you start all over.
You think, well this time let’s just try doing a duo. Kill two birds with one stone. One of you wears the headphones and the other stays in time, no music to go off except the voice of the headphone wearer. Then the headphone wearer gets out of time; they can’t hear the leader in the headphones from the sound of the person’s voice singing next to them.
You try again in a couple different configurations before concluding that it’s not the best idea. You go back to being solo and press record again.
Halfway through the take a family member, who is ever-so-supportively trying to make dinner as silently as possible in the background, turns the faucet on low but it’s still picked up by the computer. The spontaneous sound of continuous running water doesn’t really gel with the loudnesses and silences of a choir. You start again.
On the next take, you’ve made it halfway through the song and things are going great, then you get a catch in your throat and start coughing and laughing uncontrollably. Delete.
You begin to realize that this process, which you intentionally planned to give an overly ample amount of time to – a few hours – may actually require a few days. Your mind goes into a little disbelief, and you get a new thought – Should we even continue? Is it worth it? Of course we should. We must persist. It’s not like we’re mining coal; we’re singing Christmas songs. Albeit over and over. But hey, what better way to build the Christmas spirit? And what would quitting teach the kids, anyway? Yes! We shall go on!
A worse thought then comes to mind – what if no one else out there goes on? What if no one else even started? Will we become the choir? Oh Lord. Say it ain’t so. You actively shove that thought aside. It’s just too much.
You sit down again after putting some frozen food in the oven. You had hoped to save it for someday down the road when you really needed it, since you bought it at Costco and frozen food on the island costs too much. But reality has set in that neither parent will be making any real food this evening. You tap the red circle, smile as comfortably as you can muster, sing a solidly good minute or so, and the dog runs to the sliding glass door. She was throwing up earlier today after the kids brought home armfuls of cookies and chocolate from their last day of school before the break, and you don’t want to make her wait one more second to run outside and eliminate any alien substance from her body.
You sit down again. Okay – let’s get it right. Silence? Check. Smile? Check. Timer on the food? An ample eight more minutes. Voice still there? Pretty much. You record another track and voila! It’s not all that great, but hey, considering all of the environmental factors, it’ll work. Yes! One person, one song! Just seven more to go. You look at the clock and realize you’re in for a long haul.
At this point, you’ve gotten everything dialed in. Your tech-perfectionist son, who left you with his fancy camera insisting that you memorize his two quick minutes of directions on how to use it before zipping off to help at the church, walks in and sees that you’ve devolved to using substandard technology – your laptop’s camera and yellow Walkman earphones. Oh boy, are you all in trouble! You implore him to set aside his high standards and leave you with your caveman-esque equipment. He can’t bear the image seared in his mind, and from that moment on he is in – his recordings of himself will be of proper lighting, audio, and visual quality. Great! As long as he’s focused on what he’s doing and not on you. You continue as the next one of you sits down at the helm.
The learning curve begins afresh. Voices go in and out. Smiles do too. Eating is done in shifts with ever-so-quiet chewing as the recordings continue. Time slips into infinite jelly, and realistic bedtimes come and go. It doesn’t matter tonight, you think; this is for a good cause.
The younger of your two shocks you by laying down some tracks with brave independence. You’ve seen him dance and sing behind closed doors; you just didn’t expect he’d participate so willingly tonight. You relearn an old lesson on setting an example and seeing your child follow suit. Awesome!!! Keep it cool. Don’t let on how surprised you are.
Then it’s your turn – the other you in the parent pair. You’re in the hot seat. You go for expediency and hope your first recording is a wrap. At this point, you’re not at all keen on hearing your own voice over and over. It sounds way too high for any semblance of comfortability, but you continue on. It’s about the group. Not you. Thank God!
A few takes transpire and you finally finish up your second song. Rather than taking deep enough breaths at the right times, you only took half-breaths and ran out of air. Oh well. You’re sure it’s probably fine. It’s late. You don’t especially care to listen to it.
You lie down next to your younger in bed while the older child designs his set by the tree and affixes his camera to a tripod. Your younger drifts into dreamland, serenaded by his brother’s recordings. You lie in the dark, enjoying the low breathing of one sleeping lovebug and rejoicing inside that the other young love of your life singing in the next room is motivated by technology to one-up you in Christmas choir production.
You come out of the bedroom and look on as your son endures similar learning curves that he was so sure he would outwit. You give him credit for finishing faster than you did as you say goodnight to your spouse. You commit to finishing the process with your older son, as he takes over the transferring of files and the front-and-back-end edits of the videos.
Four people, 9 hours, 46 takes, 8 fairly usable videos of 2 songs. You watch your version of “Silent Night” and realize you had just about run out of gas. It’s okay.
You lie down for your own version of a silent night with an ever-so-heightened respect for everyone out there who does this virtual work for a living now.
If you would like to watch the Christmas Eve service our church is preparing, go to orcaschurch.org on December 24th and be a part of our virtual yet oh-so-real communal Christmas spirit!
(Good job, Tim M.! Everything done on your end was great!)
That was a great story, Edee!
A glimpse of real life behind the scenes…
(although i can’t helping thinking other contributors will be less “perfectionist”)
That’s precisely the irony – the only perfectionist was our older one, and he finished his much more quickly than we did. Then again, it was so late by that point that there were no distractions – pure quiet solitude! Ha!