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A Christmas Musical? What was I thinking?
I wanted to write this blog to talk about my process in creating this.
Writing
It actually started last year. I had planned to write a Christmas Vella that I wasn't able to complete on time. Vella is a neat platform for testing ideas and I was happy with how this story was coming out, I knew that I wanted to take another shot at it this year since I only had a little bit left. It ended up being longer than I originally planned but I got the story done anyway.
I was already toying with the idea of trying to turn an audiobook into a musical. My husband came up with the idea and it stuck. I never really considered myself a songwriter in any sense of the word, but I started writing intro/outro songs for my audiobooks for fun. YouTube felt like a platform where I could do anything.
My process was to write the lyrics and see if I could sing a melody on my phone.
Then I would take the rough-sounding track to Fiverr and have a pro make a musical track that fit my melody. Then I would pass the whole thing to an actual singer to perform.
My first few attempts were a lot of fun. My family members all have an interest in music and were able to collaborate.
I knew I was going to make an audiobook for this story and I needed an intro song for it. It hit me so hard and so fast, the full melody all the lyrics--everything. The problem was, the song took place inside the story rather than as an intro/outro song.
Music
Since it was a short project, I really only need a couple more songs to make it a full musical. What sounds more magical than a Christmas Musical? So I got to work. We ended up with 6 songs which is a lot more than anticipated. It also wound up being pretty expensive to produce and extremely time-consuming. I had more than 14 people working at once that I had to follow up with for the last few months. Some were singers that only had a few lines, but then they would be amazing and we'd add extra lines for them. It was a lot of back and forth.
Visuals
Figuring out visuals really came down to the wire.
Eventually, I sent some stock models to an artist to make me a few "puppets" that I fed into one of those animated picture applications so that the images appeared to be moving. Each one took time to make and then I put those into Canva to add additional effects. I added stock videos of snow behind the windows and added stock window frames to make it look like it was snowing. There were a lot more that never made it into the show. A lot of trial and error went into it.
It took forever to put together and it still isn't perfect. I would actually move some of the songs to some different places, not all the visuals are smooth, and sometimes the songs don't come in early enough. Little nitpicky things, but overall I'm very proud. I really created this cool thing from nothing.
I don't know how it'll do when it launches tomorrow but I'm glad I tried it either way. I actually wrote a Christmas Musical. A few months ago I couldn't imagine saying something like that. It's pretty cool.
Technology is literally in our hands and we just have to think outside of the box and not limit our capabilities.
I'm also a very tired Mama who created all of this during my son's nap time and I'm extremely glad it's out of my hands. I'm definitely in need of a break after this project.
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