“For the Autumn Sky” by Ruth Elaine Schram
Before
St. Michael Catholic Church of Prior Lake, MN, has an incredibly devoted adult choir, but with COVID restrictions preventing large gatherings, weekend services have moved almost entirely online. It didn’t take long for parishioners to miss their choir, so Music Director Angie O’Brien decided to bring them back together…sort of.
The plan was simple: film everyone singing their own parts to “For the Autumn Sky,” and piece them all together into a nice little music video. Of course, if you’ve ever worked with me, then you know that simple isn’t good enough.
During
In order for the singers to record their parts, they’d need a track to sing along with, so we started with the piano. There were some technical difficulties with the church’s sound system, so Angie recorded her parts using a MIDI keyboard, and I used ProTools to give it that acoustic grand piano sound.
Then, 28 individual choir members sang into whatever recording device they could find—some used microphones and interfaces, while others had to resort to their smartphones. Fortunately, mixing that many voices together as a choir isn’t too difficult. Unfortunately, the S’s landed in different place for almost everyone. It took almost 10 hours of editing just to make sure everyone’s parts lined up nicely!
Once the audio mix was done, each singer was to film themselves singing along. When all of their smiling faces came together in the final grid pattern, we felt a simple black background wasn’t quite good enough. So I took my camera to the park for a couple hours, and pointed it some real-life autumn skies.
After
The video debuted at the beginning of mass the next day, and has been live on the St. Michael Catholic Church YouTube channel ever since. The choir, staff, and parishioners alike have been raving about the video on social media, and we’ve already made plans for more virtual music videos in the future. I can’t wait to help them once again bring it all together.