WDA Music Career Program: Writing A Jingle, the final product! Part 2/2

This is a continued post about a given music assignment for our WDA Music Career Programme.

The given task was to create and produce a jingle for the song writing/music arranging course we are going through.

I only slept for about 2 - 3 hours everyday since Wednesday.
*My very serious eye bags*

=== Recap ===
My previous post was about project brainstorming, meeting my awesome team members up - Stephen and Kiah Gek, and giving you a brief idea of what a Jingle is.

By the way if you haven't been reading my blog OR missed the part I introduced our group name, we call ourselves YuMiPhen Productions which literally means 'Fish Bee Hoon'.

LMAORFLOL!!!

Read PART 1 HERE.

Let's move on to doing this video ad.

For this jingle + video assignment, YuMiPhen Productions decided to do a Stop Motion video advertisement.

A stop motion video is where you take many many (and I mean really many many many) photographs, then put and link them together into ONE video.

SATURDAY

Kiah Gek and I did a FIRST version at Stephen's place, right after we complete writing the song together with the help of MinuteManSg.

Stephen immediately proceed to work on the music arrangement for the song.

Due to all the house lightings and reflective surfaces, we couldn't find a suitable place to do our filming and the best we found was under Stephen's dining table. Kiah Gek and I stayed that way for at least 2.5 hours while MinuteManSG took the photographs for us as we moved and drew objects on the blackboard.


Photo Credit: Kiah Gek

Our reference, a book with written song lyrics and solfege:




These numbers are the Do-re-mi-fa-so used in a Solfege script.
Take the first line "4 3 4 3 4 5", we interpret it as "Fa Mi Fa Mi Fa So".

Just so we'd remember how to sing our song later.






Props purchased from Daiso:


Photo Credit: Kiah Gek


Photo Credit: Kiah Gek

This mini microphone was a birthday present from my bestie, Kyel, 2 years ago:

Photo Credit: Kiah Gek

The Tripod was too small and the camera was too heavy that we had to tape it to a Pipa Gao Bottle *budget Film-making*



The 'mystery man' who was there the whole day, working things out, helping out with the project and even chipping in ideas!

Thank you so much, MinutemanSG:

Photo Credit: Kiah Gek

Take a look at some of the photographs we took for the stop motion video.
I like the colours:










Even after 2.5hours of photo-taking, we only managed to film only one part of the song.
There are a total of THREE parts: 2 verses and a chorus.

It was already 9.30pm by then and we took a quick dinner before we proceed to the vocal recording.

10.30PM: Stephen called us in to do the vocal recording after he's got the basic song arrangement ready.

Kiah Gek blogs at http://thlastwish.blogspot.com


Photo Credit: Kiah Gek

By 12.15AM, we called it a day and went back home respectively.

SUNDAY

( T __ T ) 

I realised we made a MAJOR mistake the previous night!

We didn't calculate the timing and estimated the number of photographs we needed for each transition.
There was no storyboard (storyline) planned. We ended up with lack of photographs and story for the video. Also, Stephen included an intro and interlude which we didn't take into consideration, causing the whole video to stray out of the music timing.



This means we had to redo everything!

I spent my whole Sunday drawing a storyboard, plan out the shots while minutemanSG helped with the scene set up, hoping to stabilise the camera unlike the previous night while the shots kept shifting towards the left. Zzz….



See how MinuteManSG secured the camera by tying the tripod with sewing threads.
I used my Leopard print mini skirt as background fabric, own right?



Took about 400 photographs and short listed 200+ of them.
Our 58sec video ad is ready by 5AM~

Can't wait to see the final product, can you?

Take note of my microphone (birthday present from Kyel), my macbook from my Babyboy and my white ukelele, another birthday pressie from Fenny Hwang, Angie Chew and Conan Seow!


Here you go:
The end music was revised at least 4 times by Stephen himself.

Song Title: Will You Live Your Dream?

Produced by: YMP Productions

Song Composers/Lyricists:
Stephen Tong
Phan Kiah Gek
Colin Chang
Mint Leong

Vocalists:
Phan Kiah Gek
Mint Leong

Music Arrangement and mix:
Stephen Tong

Video:
Phan Kiah Gek
Colin Chang
Mint Leong

Video Editing and Mix:
Mint Leong

Song Lyrics:

One (want), to make good music
Two, but we had no clue
Three hundred vibrant hours
Four (for) dreams to come true

One (want) to make a difference
Two, For love and passion
Three, that's who we want to be

Can you feel the colours, motifs make melody
Can you feel the music, enjoy the lyrics
Can you feel the story, as crazy as it seems
Will you Live your dream?

And here's Kiah Gek sharing this experience with you.
Read: http://thlastwish.blogspot.sg/2013/08/wda-music-career-program-will-you-live.html


WILL YOU LIVE YOUR DREAM?

[Mint.Music.Journey] WDA Music Career Program: Writing a Jingle Part 1/2

It's one more month till my WDA Music Career Program (song writing) ends.



As much as I want to complete this course because there's so much commitment going on, I wish it wouldn't end because I won't be able to see my amazing classmates anymore!  *boohoohoo*

Please know that I'm so proud of every single one of them.
They made a huge difference in this society, daring to stand up and do what they love - Music.

Hopefully, all of us will make it into the music industry, which most of us already are.
WOHOOOO!






Back in an academic school, everyone studies for the sake of getting an academic certificate, their parents, a 'good future'…

What's a 'good future' to you?

I don't know how my 'good future' will turn out to be.
But one thing I know for sure, I will not regret that I've ever tried to do music whilst I'm alive.


Here, my classmates and I study for pure passion, love and interest in music.
Here, the vibes are so positive.
Here, we have common goals in life.
Here, we all hope that one day, music can become our career.
We are Happy  (except when it comes to the financial part for now LOLX).

It is inspiring to be around anyone of them.

Even though we come from all walks of life,
we speak the same language - music and love.

I'm so blessed.

It's the final month.
I'm going to cherish it even more with all 40 of my freaking amazing classmates, collect little pieces of information about them and share with you just how amazing they are!

Two of them, Kiah Gek and Stephen, met up with me today.
We have decided to form a team for our upcoming assignment: to make an advertisement for our music career program. The three of us are thinking of coming up with a 30s - 1 min video about the course.



Not as easy as it seems.
We have spent the entire afternoon brainstorming a full mahjong paper of ideas.





The most difficult part is to combine these ideas and write them into ONE jingle.


A jingle is a short tune/melody/song used in advertisements, particularly to promote its services/products.


1) You only have 30s to 1 min to convert ALL your message across.
2) The jingle has to be so catchy and attractive that when people hear it, they'll sing along with it or even take notice of the product when they see it outside.

For example the Jia Xiang Noodle advertisement that goes "Jia Xiang Jia Xiang Jia Xiang, Mian Mian Mian…" Everytime I walk past the stall at Jurong Point, I'll blurt out the jingle!

Here are some of my personal favourites.
My siblings and I used to know sing them all and even act them out!

This one, my younger sister sings it all the time:


This is an all-time classic.
I remembered on one family occasion where the adults threw us a performance task: to act out TV advertisements. The kids (we were young then) decided to role-play this one:



And how we'd always remember how wonderful Cadbury Chocolate is, a world of chocolate fantasy:


This is one of my favourite jingles, which is a proper song titled Sing it out loud.
They have a 3 minute plus MV which was shortened to 1.5minute and 30sec respectively for commercial use. So pro:



Who says "doing music" is improper and can't fetch you any income?

Who did these jingles then?

The lyricist and composer, the music arranger, the sound engineers, producer, publisher, sound effects-engineers etc. Aren't they professionals who "do music" for a living?

And what about teachers who teach musical instruments or/and vocals, band players, vocalists, back up vocalists, musicians, band instructors, music teachers, music academy teachers, voice-over talents, sound masters at movie-scenes?

There are plenty of job opportunities for our local music-makers, shall we not only think about one kind of job --to be a singer? If your child or better half is in love with music and hopes to path a career in this direction,  I strongly encourage you to show your support and understanding.

These are certainly jobs which require skills and professionalism. They can even fetch a decent income!

Anyway, while researching for jingles, we were brainstorming ideas for our ad too.

I'd like to show you random snippets of our brainstormed scribbles.
Personally find them quite interesting but they are really really super random.

You don't have to understand what we wrote.
Just know that A LOT A LOT A LOT of time and effort people have to spend on a 30sec advertisement and learn to appreciate these advertisements even more. Watch them and don't just switch channels please.

You don't have to buy the products, right?

Years later, I'd look back and smile at these …

Random photo 1: Coming up with a team name for credits.




FYI, Kiah Gek's mandarin name is Jia Yu.
We combined our names together and we got 'YuMiPhen', pronounced as 'Yu - Mi - Fen'.

It literally means 'Fish Bee Hoon' in mandarin!

Wahahahhaha~ 

This is crap but it's too catchy we HAD TO use it as our team name!

So it's confirmed, our team name is going to be YuMiPhen Productions, YMP Productions in short.
YMP sounds damn cool though.


More random photos: Lyrics spamming




Kiah Gek got so mind-blocked that she started drawing:


Her interpretation of a 'music jungle' when we discussed about 'lost in a music jungle':


By 8pm BOTH of us were totally not discussing about the ad anymore but just stared blank.
It's so hard arghhhhhh!!!

Stephen's at home now waiting for our melody and he plans to do a music arrangement for it.
He's a piano instructor and we are collaborating to do more music performances together!

Life has indeed become so much more meaningful and fun, thanks to being able to work with like-minded classmates like Kiah Gek and Stephen.

This post is so random I know right.
It's not a review, an advertorial but really personal blogging yah?

I wonder how the final product will turn out to be but we'll do our best.

My life is


WOHOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

*Back to work*