I ended up settling on this dress for the “Violining Vanessa”character in Alex’s script. I absolutely fell in love with the color and the silky fabric AND it was a million times more comfortable than the hourglass dresses!
Originally, originally – when I first came up with the Carlsbad movie idea and before I hired the video crew – I really wanted to wear 3 different hourglass dresses that I thought would really compliment the stalactites and stalagmites of the caverns with their shape and their colors.
BUT, the dresses sure didn’t look the same on me as they did on the models, haha, and I wasn’t sure that I could loose the extra 10 pounds necessary for me to feel comfortable wearing them.
So, I sadly returned them and went back to the drawing board for outfit ideas.
Here are the 2 outfits we narrowed down to! Stay tuned as I’ll be posting soon about the outfit iterations and ups and downs we had getting to this point!
Here’s a copy of the movie script that Alex put together. The music video tells a story through music and no words but it sure helped with the filming process to have a concrete storyline to follow!
One of the snags we came up against early on was how to film a music video with no sound! Here’s the solution I came up with and it worked out well in the end, thank goodness!
You’ve now seen the rehearsing and recording part of the project and now its time for a bunch of BTS of preparing and filming the music video at Carlsbad Caverns!!
I found my awesome crew by way of Lon’s (the composer) connections and friends at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. I was then in turn referred to Chromatic Stories. It was an absolute pleasure collaborating with Larry, Luis, Alex, and Jacob and I cant wait to share all the fun times we had!
Back in 2014, I mailed postcards to composition professors in music departments across the United States and Canada. These postcards announced a competition I was running — a competition for composers to write a piece for violin and piano. This piece had to tell a musical story of a beautiful, scenic place that meant a lot to them personally.
Lon Chaffin, the composition professor, and Music Department chair at New Mexico State in Las Cruces found one such postcard on his desk. But the deadline to submit a composition had already passed. (Oops, on my part!) Not to be deterred, he contacted me and asked if he could write a piece regardless. I was just starting to cook up the National Parks project, and he got really excited about writing a piece about Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico.
Keep reading to learn more about this very special national park music and how it marks the first of many National Park Compositions projects.
I love recording and making everything as perfect as it can possibly be. And collaborating with Eric and Michael was amazing! I’m looking forward to working with of them again for future parks! Stay tuned for the fruits of our labor coming to you later this week in the form of an audio file of Carlsbad
Here they are! Pictures from recording Carlsbad at Tanglewood Productions with Michael Eardley in Reno, NV and Eric Kao on piano. Stay tuned for a couple BTS videos I’ll be sharing later this week 🙂
