In celebration of Halloween Hurtwood released what is probably our greatest Project YouTube to date. The spine-tingling, gothic rock performance with blazing fire pits lighting up the night sky and musicians dressed as medieval monks, has already had tens of thousands of views.
Like all our other Project YouTube videos our rock-metal twist on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ was captured LIVE on location. We have had many celebrities guest starring in the past and this time it was the turn of the West End’s own Holly-Anne Hull who sang alongside rising Hurtwood talents Millie Hulse and Pippa Williams. The unique feature of every Project YouTube is that everything seen and heard in the videos is performed live in one epic take with no lip-syncing. The video is filmed by Hurtwood’s student-led camera crew (this time directed by Molly Palmer) and the student audio engineers, led by Amber Benn, had the opportunity to work alongside industry professional Matt Greaves, the Musical Director for many a West End show such as ‘We will Rock You’ and ‘Calendar Girls’. ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ is truly a team collaboration with students and ex-students working side by side. This features Cameron Sinclair on guitar, Bashy Slater, Oz Dechaine on Bass with Szymon Nagorski and Ava Foy as part of the audio crew. The camera crew consisted of Imy Richardson, Clancy Hanna-Barron and Cohen Rowland. Our resident lighting designer Guy Davey performed his usual magic and meanwhile our Photography students captured every moment.
For the uninitiated, let’s take a closer look at Project YouTube created by Dan Pearson (aka Rex Pearson) about a decade ago.
At Hurtwood the project now involves about 30 students each year ranging from singers, guitarists, drummers, saxophonists and photographers as well as those who are part of the video or audio crews. The first PYT video was released in 2017 and since then there have been 38 videos made and we are currently producing about five or six a year. A huge amount of work goes into each video as they are all original musical arrangements so that the covers are all created in a new and exciting way.
Historically, when Dan joined the school, he realised that this was the perfect medium to support our A Level Music Technology. His YouTube following (which now numbers around 50K followers) gave the students a creative platform on which he could show the versatility of the guitar and inspire them by producing the coolest possible videos with different guitar led twists. Nowadays as most of the parts are student led, it is about learning on the job and in particular learning how to overcome challenges. Many of the videos are set in locations that are not built for recording (boats sailing down a river and in old churches) and as a result a huge amount of technical knowledge is acquired by the students.
Another unique factor about PYT is the extraordinary calibre of the guests who have included Ben Haenow the winner of ‘The X-Factor’, professional singers such as Emma Heesters and Hannah Trigwell and Dharni the world champion beatboxer. Dan finds it very hard to pick a favourite but one that stands out for him is the one on the canal boat where necessity being the mother of invention, they made a drum kit out of a barrel of water with a pedal kick drum to give a rustic feel. Indeed he always loves the creative process as it gives students the chance to experiment musically.
Dan states that the ‘Abbey Road’ ones were the biggest projects so far. To be given a weekend slot at Abbey Road is gold dust for any aspiring artist and once Dan had convinced the studio to let
our students in to record, there was about “3 months of hard graft making all the different musical arrangements for the twelve-piece band that Hurtwood brought in, rehearsing and planning the lights and cameras”. In true Project YouTube style, the idea was to push the students creatively and musically to achieve something very special. This is no doubt a life memory that the students will be talking about for decades to come. Working alongside sound engineers and Pro tools engineers at one of the most famous recording studios in the world was one of life’s pinch me moments for those aspiring musicians and audio engineers. Career wise it also represents CV dynamite and doors have opened for students as they have gained wonderful internships with major channels on the back of this such as with ‘Working Title’ and ‘Channel 4’.
We filmed three Abbey Road videos featuring different singers and musicians and our film students are currently editing their documentary about the whole process from start to finish. Watch out in December for the next Project YouTube offering which is the Hurtwood version of the Oasis song ‘Half the World Away’.