We Won!

So a couple of weeks ago, the The Straits Times (Singapore’s national English-language newspaper) along with NETS, launched a Singalong music-video competition with the theme “In This Together”, dangling a $1000 cash prize for each of the ten best entries. Something to keep non-essential folk like us busy during the long lockdown days. 

Now if you’re subscribed to our YouTube channel, you’ll know that The Chu girls like to make music videos all the time anyway, just for fun – so this project was right up our street. Participants had to compose an original song (no longer than sixty seconds), featuring the line “In this Together”. Additionally, the song needed to be presented as a music video and would be judged on singing ability, creativity and performance energy. The girls were definitely up for it!

Having never tried proper songwriting before, composing was the hardest part of the challenge for us. We decided to approach the theme from the girls’ point of view, and let’s be honest, their experience of the pandemic hasn’t been too traumatic. The worst they’ve had to endure is being stuck at home with our summer travel plans cancelled. So, that’s pretty much all they could come up with to complain sing about. 

We agreed the trajectory of their song had better move quickly from whiny to inspirational. The girls channelled their inner National Day spirit to put down some ideas for an energizing chorus. Then we decided to use the key phrase “In This Together” as a refrain throughout to tie the whole song together. A lot of editing and speeding-up ensued to get the song down to 58 seconds, and we used our rudimentary knowledge of Garageband to cobble together a basic backing track. Thankfully the girls had attended some free Garageband sessions at the Apple Store over the Christmas break! Miss Chu has also become pretty adept at harmonising lately and was able to improvise a few harmony parts on the fly for the enthusiastic members of our “Zoom choir”.

Making the video was the easy part. As the song is about being stuck in their room, it made sense enough to shoot most of the video…in their room. But when we were brainstorming lyrics, the idea of everyone currently being “trapped” in Zoom windows, and the current trend of “Zoom choirs” was something we were keen to try and portray. 

So the girls had a lot of fun dressing up as various versions of themselves to populate our “Zoom screen” for the chorus. We’ve played around with greenscreens in several of our old videos and decided to use it here to create all the different characters, all stuck in their various bedrooms (yes we had fun selecting these!) on Zoom. We also wanted to show the idea of “breaking out” of Zoom as a symbol of future freedom, and managed to edit the footage so that the girls appear to “jump out” of their frame as they sing about going outside to play.

All in all we were really happy with how our song turned out regardless of the competition outcome. Nevertheless – there was much ecstatic shrieking in the household when we found out our submission was one of the ten winners! Even though there have been some stressful and dreary moments during this circuit breaker, winning this challenge has gifted the girls a treasured memory of their time together amidst all the doom and gloom. Hope you enjoy our song!

And here’s a link to the online article so you can see the other 9 winners.