HAPPY PLAY MUSIC ON THE PORCH DAY!!

I recently learned about “Play Music on the Porch Day Worldwide.” Their social media pages were bursting with people playing music from all over the globe —Japan, Iran, Australa, Zimbabwe, Brazil, Madagascar, US, Canada—and everything about it made me so happy.

The organizers propose the following,

"What if for one day everything stopped and we all just listened to the music?"

The event takes place on the last Saturday of August. This year my calendar was full with The Orchestra of Northern New York concerts so I made a mental note to fiddle on my porch next year. Days before our performances, the spread of the Delta variant forced a last minute cancelation. Suddenly, Play Music on The Porch Day became something to help cushion the blow of another year of canceled gigs.

THE SPARK

One tiny sliver of a silver lining to the pandemic is that my teenage son Sylvain has been “hanging around” with my husband and me. Syl even mentioned that he wanted to make a simple twin fiddle video before he went back to college. With my weekend plans wiped away and the serendipity of hearing about the event, we decided to make a video.

This was our easiest video to shoot and edit to date and we were proud of the one day turnaround. Here’s how we did it.

THE TUNE
We selected a tune. I had a rough draft of an arrangment for Elizic’s Farewell that I had played around with my sister years ago, but had never fully explored or polished. I sat for a few days and edited the arrangment and and forced myself to punch it into Finale. I hope to perform this in the future with a full ensemble. The days leading up to the shoot were well into the 90s, but Syl was willing to give the tune some time.

CAMERA ANGLES

Being a porch fest, our location didn’t require much thought. We thought through the most efficient camera angles with our two phones and decided to do two center shots- high and low and two feature cameras each for a total of four videos (two takes) we’d have to juggle.

STAGING
Knowing where the cameras would be pointed, I tidied up a bit, gathered some flowers from our yard, had my husband sit and pretend to play fiddle, strategically placed bouquets, plugged in some extra lights and the stage was set.

FILMING

We were ready to film just as every neighbor decided to mow their lawn, delivery trucks drove around our block, the small nearby airport was giving flight lessons by looping over our house, and the plumber called to say his plans changed and he was coming right over. We waited for a while for things to calm down, but since we had one day to film, edit and publish, we decided it was now or never.

We did a few videos of the center shots until we were satisfied. Took us a minute to get into the groove. Then we moved the camera into the “Gretchen and Syl” featured positions. Ideally, I should have used a metronome so the second take would match the tempo of the 1st take, but I relied on my dance fiddler instincts and thankfully we played both takes at exactly the same speed. After one take from this angle, we were ready to edit.

EDIT/MIX

Syl and I laughed at how easy this was to edit. We watched the footage together and said- “go to the center shot, go to me, go to you.” Then Syl sent me the audio that I ran through Garage Band to give just a wee bit of reverb and make minor sound adjustments which I sent back for him to replace in the video.

SOCIAL MEDIA

As Syl fine tuned the edits, I sat next to him and made a thumbnail for Facebook, Youtube and IGTV. I wrote up our text for each platform, organized a timetable for releases, and thought of a few relavent hashtags. When Syl was done, we uploaded the videos as I punched in all the info.

VIDEO

It was ready to share on facebook, twitter, Instagram and Youtube.

Here's an arrangement I wrote to play with my son Syl to celebrate "Play Music on the Porch Day!!" Hope you're able to experience a moment of musical joy today and everyday. Be well & take care of one another.

Be well, friends,

~Gretchen