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carolinetan2003@yahoo.com
carmieletan@gmail.com
euan_matthewtan@yahoo.com
bonnielover12191@aol.com

Musicians are artists attempting to recreate a vision through auditory imagery that allows the listener to not merely hear the chirping of a bird, but to see the message behind those simple sounds. Music education is crucially important by affording us the tools and experience we need to share that vision with the rest of the world as well as to further enrich this society that we belong to. For without access to guidance from our music instructors in our local public schools, how can we fully express the depths of our imagination? Music education programs give music aficionados like us a place to belong to, as well as a cause with which to identify with. They, therefore, not only help us foster our talents and passions for playing and creating music but also team and leadership qualities. Ask any section leader in our high school orchestra, and they will gladly inform you of all the challenges they face in trying to teach and direct a group of unruly teenagers how to play a note together, let alone in pitch. Creating music is ultimately a collaborative effort, as evident by the hundreds of music producers and editors in the music industry, just as most activities in life are. It is not for naught that music education programs encourage cooperation between young musicians at a young age. Nothing encourages unity among people more than music, and by a proxy, more than music education programs, and it is this reason why they should never be abolished.

We decided that the whole concept behind the song "Airplanes" fit our ambitious and reminiscent tone, so we used its melody as the basis for our parody and changed the lyrics to revolve around saving music education. We also transcribed the various instrumental parts of the song by ear onto music sheets for playing, and recorded several takes of each part. We then combined the different recordings and edited them to form one cohesive instrumental track as our backing for the video. After that was finished, we recorded the vocal parts of the song, and had several people alternate rapping and singing the lyrics we created. We also featured some of our fellow brothers and sisters from our Glee Club at school for visual and auditory background support. In order to create the perfect atmosphere for our music video, we attempted to to capture various locations around our neighborhood and school in our footage and even used one of our weekends to hike around Griffith Park for the perfect scenes. The top of one of the largest hills in Griffith gave us an excellent view of the city skyline as well as inspiration for a deserted violin scene. More editing ensued, with many of the frustrations that come with such a job, but the finished product was largely to our satisfaction.

Putting the footage together was incredibly tedious because the footage we shot sometimes simply did not turn out the way we envisioned it. We were forced to re-film or completely change many scenes, cutting into the already limited free time we had for a project alongside our heavy school work. Finding time to edit the video and audio itself posed another challenge, as well as the right programs to edit them with. We would have to convert many files from their original formats to ones that worked with the programs we chose. But perhaps the largest challenge we had was the lack of a strong enough video card on our computer to support the quality of our videos, forcing us to work with jerky, delayed images that would never line up with our audio. We had to rely on our instincts in determining which video clip was which and kind of guess our way through trial and error.