The accolade is for Project YouTube which has made over 40 videos to date, many with hundreds of thousands of views. Congratulations are due to our Music Technology teacher, guitarist extraordinaire, Rex Pearson who spearheaded the project. This year the competition for the Muddy Stilettos’ award (held in association with Debrett’s Education) was fiercer than ever as over 500 schools from around the country entered.
The unique feature of every PYT is that everything seen and heard in the videos is performed LIVE in one take with no lip-syncing. The videos are filmed by Hurtwood’s student-led camera crew and the student audio engineers. The judges were impressed that so many Hurtwood students from different subject areas worked together to produce the professional live videos. Each PYT can involve singers, guitarists, drummers, saxophonists and photographers as well as the student teams in the video and audio crews. The videos have been set in many different locations at Hurtwood itself, from the theatre and studios to the grounds. The ‘Phantom of the Opera’ video, which was made in celebration of Halloween last October, already has thousands of views. We have also ventured far and wide from churches to canal boats and even to the famous Abbey Road Studios. Over the years another unique factor about PYT has been the extraordinary calibre of the professional guests including Ben Haenow the winner of ‘The X-Factor’, many professional singers and Dharni the world champion beatboxer.
In PYT teamwork is key and the list of students involved in the last production included a student director, student camera operator, student assistant camera operator, student lighting designer, student set designer, student technical support and runner. As Muddy Stilettos appreciated, the results have been extraordinary. Students are queuing up to get involved and their technical abilities have majorly improved with the opportunity to work with professional video and audio recording equipment alongside music industry professionals.
To date our most successful video is ‘I Say a Little Prayer for You’ featuring Frankie Beetlestone and guest artist Heidi Joubert which has over 3.5 million streams across all platforms. However, we are filming another PYT tomorrow which may top even that!
(Hurtwood was also a finalist in the ‘Dynamic Performing Arts’ category for our production of ‘The Witches of Eastwick’ which won ‘Best Musical 2025’ at the National School Theatre Awards last week.)
