I Truly Care About You- Making the Video
Welcome back to my blog everyone! Yesterday I wrote a blog about the backstory of how I ended up writing I Truly Care About You. Today, I’ll be sharing with you about how I eventually put together the video for this song, making it my second YouTube video uploaded and my first original song available to the public. It’s interesting that I’ve been writing songs for so many years and the first song I share with the world is the one I most recently wrote. But at the time that I wrote it, last summer, it wasn’t EXACTLY complete.
As I mentioned yesterday, my fingers were not used to the guitar’s fret board and its six, sharp strings. But because this song is so meaningful to me, I felt inspired to rearrange my school schedule for the fall and take a beginning guitar class. Because of that class, I learned to be more(but not perfectly) comfortable with a guitar and I learned about different plucking patterns for chords.
Learning about these patterns helped me realize that I could give my song more texture rather than just strumming open chords. Little did I know that this basic knowledge of playing guitar would help me with the very first video I would put on my channel.
Along with learning how to play guitar, my fall semester of 2021 helped me find a location for my video. I don’t think I should share too many details of my school.. Let’s just say that thanks to a friend, I found a tunnel in the basement of one of the school buildings that led to a door outside. I thought it was perfect for my video! It felt like I was pulling someone out of their dark tunnel and inviting them into the sunlight as I opened the door at the end of the video.
If you’ve read my Tuesday blog, you might recall that I mentioned not having anything to connect my phone to a tripod. You may be asking, “But how did you get your footage? Did you bring your art project and Cello to school? Or did you carry a school music stand all the way down to that basement?”
Well just after uploading my Christmas video and while I had a week or so left of my winter break, I bought myself a tripod with a device on top that could secure my phone in place. Buying that tripod has made it so much easier to record things since then! It really helped with getting different angles for the shots of when I was on the couch in the second verse.
Speaking of those shots on the couch, I was originally hoping to ask the friend of mine “with the bright shining face” who inspired this song to help me with the video for the second verse. My plan was to be outside and ask him to “make me laugh with [his] silliness”. But before I even got around to asking him, there was a beautiful sunny afternoon that I didn’t want to miss filming.
This was January in the northern hemisphere, so I needed to take advantage of any chance of sunlight I could get! So I quickly set up my tripod at a good angle by that couch and started improvising a scene. For the sake of time, I had decided to skip my idea of having someone to help out and make me laugh. Yup, there was no one there. I was laughing at myself talking to a bunch of couch cushions! Comment down below on whether or not you thought it was genuine!
Lastly, I’d like to share with you the miracle of this experience of putting this video together. I had actually gotten sick at the beginning of January, and I didn’t have much of a singing voice. But I had promised myself to do a video each month, and I couldn’t wait for myself to get better before doing a lip syncing video recording. So I recorded myself while I was sick so I could make the videos without having to wait to get better.
As the end of the month got closer, I tried to re-sing the song, hoping that I would sound better and that it would still line up with my lip syncing. But the only thing I could think of was to listen to my original recording and sing along. Unfortunately, that caused my voice to still fall flat! I didn’t know what to do and the month of January was about to end!
So in frustration and a bit of humility and faith, I prayed next to my computer asking God for help. I then decided to mute the vocal part I had been listening to and sang while only listening to the guitar accompaniment. After I was done, I listened to it while watching the video I had already put together. I was surprised that every time my face came on the screen lip syncing, it matched up with the audio! Thanks to this awesome miracle, I was able to upload my video at the end of January. The new vocal recording wasn’t perfect, but I wasn’t as sick as I was before and it sounded much better.
Make sure you check out the video and sheet music to this song if you haven’t already! Please remember to look at the links previously mentioned and leave a comment down bellow! Thanks for reading all the way to the end!
