Marisa is the activity coordinator at River Meadows Nursing Home, one of Springcare’s Shropshire Nursing Homes. Situated in the quiet village of Edgebolton, Shawbury. Here, she explains how she came to make a fun video at the home with fellow staff members and residents.
River Meadows Nursing Home received an email one day asking us to record a video of a “show” we did with the residents for a competition. It didn’t take much convincing to join in.
Now these are challenging times and we do ask our residents to adhere to social distancing, so how could we possibly do this without breaching guidelines. A music video would be best as we could film everyone individually and nobody would have to sing live (which means more people are willing to take part). The song choice was fun, we wanted something that reflected the current times and reached across generations. Queen was an obvious choice. We were inspired by the original video (the hoover and Freddy in a mini skirt) but also wanted to capture our home and everything that goes on. I filmed on my smart phone and gave myself a crash course on editing software. I used OpenShot as I could overlay different tracks and use a few effects and filters. Do your research, there are some great videos with tips and tricks out there. When we filmed this I adopted the approach of “attack” more than prep. I knew what I wanted to do, got peoples permission to participate and filmed straight away. I filmed a few takes and let them watch it back to see if they were happy. I never spent longer than 20 minutes with anyone. This kept it fresh. I always played the music in the background and gave clear instructions as we were filming (it’s a music video so all audio was turned off anyway). This was a lot of fun. Everyone had their own ideas and I just went with what they came up with. Editing took some time. Matching the miming with the music track took a little fiddling. If you are attempting this yourself my advice to you is to use more than one track as it gives you smoother transitions between scenes. All that was left to do was to show it to all involved and get their consent. I was very clear that this would be “out there” for everyone to see so I needed to be sure everyone was happy with the end result.
What do you think? Who did it better? River Meadows or Queen?