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Bring Me Sunshine competition winner

Bring Me Sunshine competition winner

BRING ME SUNSHINE BEST COVER VERSION COMPETITION WINNER ANNOUNCED

In partnership with Hal Leonard Europe we ran a competition on Make Music Day, 21 June, for the best cover version of the timeless classic, Bring Me Sunshine. Thank you to everyone who took part by posting their videos using the hashtags #MakeMusicDayUK and #MySunshine. Entries were shortlisted and judged by Make Music Day UK, Hal Leonard Europe, Together TVMaking Music and Apollo5. We received 33 brilliant entries from across the UK and are thrilled to announce the winner is Totally Sound.

We had a great selection of entries for the Bring Me Sunshine competition and we had a difficult job as judges choosing a winner, given the excellence and diversity shown in the videos. Totally Sound emerged as our winner because their submission captures so much of what Make Music Day is all about: people getting together to play and sing for the sheer joy of it. We thought the arrangement was vibrant and inventive, energetically performed, and a great group effort in performance. Well done to everyone involved!

– Tom Farncombe, Strategic Partnerships Director, Hal Leonard Europe

TOTALLY SOUND

YouTube video

Recorded and produced by Reel Youth Media, an Edinburgh based Digital Media Youth Project for 12 – 19 year olds. Supporting young musicians to create innovative digital media content.

A Little Bit About Reel Youth Media…
Reel Youth Media is a creative digital music project for young people aged 12 – 19 years old which aims to develop technical and creative production skills whilst supporting young musicians, performers and youth music service providers to create innovative digital media content and live events. The project was established in 2015 and has supported hundreds of young musicians and music technologists across Edinburgh and beyond ever since.  
 
The project is funded by Creative Scotland’s Youth Music Initiative and delivered by City of Edinburgh Council.
 
We have an established network of partners across central Scotland and have delivered successful youth music projects alongside BBC Scotland, National Museums of Scotland, Holyrood Parliament, LGBT Youth Scotland,  WOMAD, Totally Sound Youth Music Project, Tonegarden Studios, Canongate Youth, 6VT Youth, Goodtrees Neighbourhood Centre, Dunedin Canmore, Meadows Festival, Off The Record, Wide Days, Dancebase, The Thistle Foundation, Making Tracks, MusicPlus, Out Of The Blue Drillhall, and many more…
 
Examples of some of this work can be seen at our YouTube Channel and Facebook Page.
 
Our core provision runs on Saturday afternoons from 1pm-4pm at South Bridge Resource Centre where we deliver a programme of workshops and training for young people.  These workshops include live sound production, digital recording techniques, photography and videography, event management, digital music making, and digital DJ’ing.  We provide access to highly skilled tutors, a range of digital equipment and a full calendar of music making events and opportunities.  Many of the young people who have attended our provision have gone onto further learning at various further and higher education in music technology and performance related subjects.  A lot of them continue to support our work by returning to volunteer and mentor the next generation of Reel Youth Media participants.
 
A Little Bit About Our Lockdown Activity…
This past term has proved challenging for everyone and, for Reel Youth Media, we had to quickly adapt our provision to continue to support young people in their creative throughout the Corona Virus lockdown period.
 
 
Very early on we had identified the Make Music Day event as something that we could use as a focal point for our term time activity.
 
 
We began planning for this towards the end of March, realising that our usual series of concerts and live events, that mark the end of our summer term, wasn’t going to happen.  Instead we began developing our online provision with a weekly series of ‘Lockdown Live’ performances, live streamed on Facebook, supported by our live sound tutor, Leonora Winstanley.  This series of live performances were used as a training opportunity for young people, with our young music techs arranging ‘virtual sound-checks’ with performers developing their skills in live streaming.   Our young ‘virtual sound engineers’,  with tutor support, were advising performers about camera positioning, sound issues, instrument changes, checking internet connection speeds and troubleshooting issues around live-streaming.
 
 
We had a full programme of live events across the term with 2 hours off livestream performances every Saturday for 10 weeks.  This was all steered towards our Make Music Day ‘Lockdown Live Festival’ on 21st June when we had over 4 hours of livestream performances across the afternoon.
 
We worked closely with our partners at Totally Sound Youth Music Project to prepare young performers and continued this work to deliver our ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ project.
 
 
We were getting great conversations with young performers in preparation for their live-streams around how to approach performing in the virtual spaces, and on different platforms.  Skills around how to interact with comments, and how to handle the inevitable glitches and gremlins of digital devices as a performer, and even how to begin producing livestream content using ‘home studio’ level technology.  Our engagement with Make Music Day very much helped to shape this focus.
 
On Sunday 21st June to celebrate Make Music Day, we had a wonderful afternoon of music making, livestream performances and video premieres to end our term activities here at Reel Youth Media, alongside Totally Sound Youth Music Project. For our young musicians and producers who took part, or attended the virtual events and commented, shared and liked… it was a really wonderful shared experience which was clearly inspiring for everyone involved.
 
 
As well as our ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ video project, Reel Youth Media also supported two further video premieres as part of the Make Music Day celebrations.
 
 
 
Our Make Music Day UK 2020 celebrations became our ‘end of term’ show and, during what was a remarkable and very strange term, it provided a fantastic finale.
 
A Little Bit About Calum Baird…
Another very noteworthy success this term was the musical journey of Calum Baird.  Calum is a young singer who has struggled with confidence over a number of years and is an incredibly shy and quiet young man.  Despite this, with support from Totally Sound tutors, Calum was encouraged to take part in our ‘Lockdown Live’ performance opportunity.  We had identified issues with Calum’s internet connection speed during our virtual soundcheck session. Calum was using his 4G connection on his smartphone and didn’t have access to a broadband connection.  During his performance, after two or three songs, the connection was so poor that audio was nothing more than static and crackle.  We made the difficult decision to pull the plug and try again. This attempt was not successful and Calum was left a little bit upset in the aftermath of the performance.  Further issues with connection speed surfaced during his tutor sessions and it was increasingly evident that Calum was unable to fully access our provision as a result of his hardware and internet connection. 
 
Calum attends Castlebrae High School and lives in Niddrie Mill, one of the highest SIMD areas in Scotland, and in an area where his network coverage on O2 saw a significant drop in bandwidth.  Luckily our line manager, Scott Wilkins, was able to reach out to our partners at Goodtrees Neighbourhood Centre where Youthwork Manager John Beatson had been supporting the delivery of tablets and 4G routers, using the EE network, to disadvantaged families to enable them to get online during the lockdown period.  This initiative was funded by the Greenspace Trust.  Goodtrees Neighbourhood Centre provided a brand new tablet and 4G router for Calum, enabling him to take part in online learning and, as part of Make Music Day 2020, perform his complete set (with no glitches or audio issues!).  For many of the tutors involved in delivering our digital provision this term, Calum’s performance at Lockdown Live Festival as part of Make Music Day, and his journey across the term, has been the highlight of the year so far and a perfect example of the work that our project is about.
 
A Little Bit About Our ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ Project…
Our partners at Totally Sound Youth Music Project got right behind the ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ challenge and, with their delivery of live tutor sessions 5 days a week, were preparing and rehearsing with young performers across the term. The young musicians and performers who took part in the learning and recording of the parts had enormous fun.
 
 
The tutor team at Totally Sound Youth Music Project created an arrangement of the piece and recorded guide tracks and video lessons for young people. These were supported by the delivery of virtual tutor sessions using Facebook Video calls.  The Reel Youth Media team, lead by Stephen Tierney, produced a series of guidelines for young people to record video on their phones, tablets and digital devices in order to create the necessary audio and video tracks to complete the finished piece.
 
The audio was then mixed and produced by Mike Cameron before the finished video was edited together.
 
 
The YouTube premiere of our ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ video as part of Make Music Day UK 2020 certainly provided the finished piece with the distinction of being part of ‘event’ viewing.  
 
 
The young people had lots of fun taking part in the project and being able to share in their music making with their friends and tutors from Totally Sound and Reel Youth Media.  Lots of young people got involved but here are some of the featured performers:
 
 
Anna Lodge – Vocals
Calum Baird – Vocals
Lola Colvin – Vocals
Erin Tee – Violin Solo
Calum Anderson – Vocals
Jai Sardesai – Keyboards
Magnus Turpie – Drums
Josh McGhee – Percussion
 
Reel Youth Media are:
Scott Wilkins – City Of Edinburgh Council Lifelong Learning Development Officer – Arts and Creative Learning
 
Stephen Tierney – Project Coordinator
Leonora Winstanley – Live Sound Tutor
Steve Rhind – Digital Recording Tutor
Lewis Kyle – Videography Tutor
Marley Clark – Digital Trainee (Visual)
Joseph Flower – Digital Trainee (Audio)
John Percival – Volunteer
Jason Akan – Volunteer
 
Follow Reel Youth Media on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @reelyouthmedia.org

RUNNERS UP

TRAILBLAZERS QUARTET

YouTube video


ISLAND ARTS

YouTube video


ULSTER YOUTH ORCHESTRA

YouTube video


DYLAN PATTERSON

 

 
 
 
 
 
View this post on Instagram
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

#makemusicdayuk #mysunshine

A post shared by Dylan Paterson (@the_real_dylan_paterson) on


IntOne Youth Music Group

 

 
 
 
 
 
View this post on Instagram
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

Some of our members joined in with this video of Bring Me Sunshine for #MakeMusicDayUK !! Link to the full video in our bio – hope it brightens your day! ☀️#MySunshine @makemusicdayuk

A post shared by Pitch Purple 2020 (@pitchpurple2020) on

All of the entries can be found by searching #MakeMusicDayUK and #MySunshine on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

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