Hello and welcome to my blog! I wanted to start this off by sharing my family’s parody of “22” by Taylor Swift and talking about our process making it. This was in place of our traditional holiday card this year.
My family always has a lot of fun with our holiday cards and decided to change it up a bit. Our 2018 holiday “card” was also a song parody. We called it “Another Year Bites the Dust” as a parody of “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen. We even recreated the Queen cover photo (attached at the bottom). In addition to the video, we mailed out physical cards and included directions on how to find the video.
In this year’s video, we decided to create, record, and produce the parody in place of sending out cards. We made a reference to our 2018 parody in one of the lyrics in the first verse. See if you can find it. This video took a lot of hard work to complete, but we had a blast doing so!
Behind the scenes look at our process:
The first thing we did was choose a song that we wanted to do a parody of. “22” by Taylor Swift seemed like the most appropriate choice since we were going into 2022. We worked as a family to come up with our lyrics and wanted to make sure we talked about each person and their highlights of the year. One of our lyrics was “stayed up till midnight writing this parody” and that is 100% true. We all sat in the kitchen one night trying to brainstorm our lyrics. This was only a few days before New Year’s Eve, so we didn’t have much time, but we made it work.
Next, I recorded everyone playing their instrument with Logic Pro X. I recorded Alex playing the drums, then recorded myself playing some guitar. Next, I recorded my mom’s electric bass part, and then my dad’s sax part. Finally, everyone recorded their vocals. Usually Zach and I do all the singing, but we thought it would be fun to feature everyone’s voice. All of the recording was done in our music room, a.k.a. our living room.
Once the music was all ready to go, we started filming the video. As soon as we finished filming, I started editing the video with Adobe Premiere Pro. At this point, we were 1 day away from NYE so I was definitely pressured for time, but it was definitely worth it. (Hopefully next year we’ll start planning this a little bit earlier lol.) The final step was to upload it to YouTube and set up a live YouTube Premiere so that anyone could join and participate in the live chat.
I hope you all enjoy the the video and have a happy and healthy new year!
I’d love to tell you more about our family band, Stay Tuned, in a future blog post so if that’s something you’d be interested in reading about let me know :)
- Candice Lee 💕
