This started as a small group of artists wanting to do something heartfelt and authentic at the start of the lockdown. It grew into something much bigger – a national and historic moment of hope that we will be able to look back on with immense pride.
South Africa (27 April 2020) – At the end of March – and the start of #LockdownSA – a group of over 50 of South Africa’s most talented performing artists came together – virtually – to perform our national anthem as part of the #AnthemChallengeRSA initiative.
Each of the artists recorded their proud rendition individually at home. The recordings were collated into a single video and shared across social media with an invitation to all South Africans: JOIN US!
The nation was challenged to submit videos of themselves performing our anthem; the result is a 1 000+ piece virtual choir of South Africans from every walk of life performing together in a show of true unity before President Cyril Ramaphosa begins the process of reducing the Covid-19 lockdown restrictions.
“The process of receiving all the video submissions was both exhilarating and emotional,” says James Bassingthwaighte, part of the #AnthemChallengeRSA creative team.
“It took a significant amount of bravery to put yourself on the spot and sing an anthem in five different languages to a video camera and more than a thousand ordinary South Africans rose to the challenge! We easily managed to fill the 1 000 slots we were hoping to achieve and are actually still receiving submissions, even though the deadline has passed!
“The variety of submissions was extraordinary. We had families, groups of friends, choirs, recorder players and entire orchestras stepping up to join us! It really was amazing to see the ingenuity and the support that this project attracted from South Africans under lockdown.”
“One Thousand South Africans Perform Our Anthem” was released last night (Sunday) on YouTube and is a once-in-a-lifetime choral tapestry led by well-known South Africans including Busiswa, ProVerb, Leah, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, Andre Schwartz, Donald, Katlego Maboe, Zolani Mahola, Tumi Morake, Khaya Dladla, Danny K, Relebogile Mabotja, Caroline Grace, Moonchild Sanelly, Willem Botha, KB and others. In the video, the 1000 strong virtual choir appears on screen, slowly but surely revealing a striking image of our national flag in full furl.
“This started as a small group of artists wanting to do something heartfelt and authentic at the start of the lockdown. It grew into something much bigger – a national and historic moment of hope that we will be able to look back on with immense pride,” says Bassingthwaighte.
“This was never planned as a ‘Freedom Day release’, but what could be more appropriate than reflecting on the anthem to honour our civil liberties – and particularly in 2020 as we look forward to the Covid-19 lockdown being eased?”
Watch the video below:
Here’s a glimpse into the technical side of how the video was made:
Firstly, the numbers… 1027 Videos @ 400×400 90 Columns @ 400x 5200 6 3/4 Panels @ 5200 x 5200 1 Canvas @ 15600 x 10400 1 FINAL canvas with some late additional columns @18000 x 10400 7TB of project space And all of this over Dropbox, Videocalls and Teamviewer! Not bad for a 2 minute video
Here’s the technical explanation from Peter Heaney at 9mm Films, who put the video together:
“We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into! This has been a monster effort, but as always it’s been a great learning curve, and we’ve come up with some neat solutions and streamlined processes along the way.
In the end, the way we got it done fastest was to start slowly and methodically with the videos themselves. One always feels there must be a shortcut, but ultimately the shortcut was to make sure we’d taken the time to format and time every video correctly, to begin with, and everything flowed from there. Starting with the right materials means a smoother process, in the long run, I guess.
It also became clear that a phased approach to renders was the only way the systems would manage.
To start, the amazing folks at Thatch Audio ingested the source videos into their mix software and synced it up. They then adjusted and exported to us so that we all had a common starting point and duration (1000 people singing in unison!)
James from Thatch then allocated exactly where in our final composition each person would go, and the videos were given a unique file name to correspond with their position on that grid.”
This is where 9mmFilms took over, ingesting the videos, resizing, reframing, and repairing any errors before exporting each video with its unique file name at a resolution of 400 x 400 pixels.
We decided early on that square videos would be the best option with the huge variety of framing we’d receive.
We toyed around with methods of creating the frame in the early days, finally settling on an edit first scenario to take full advantage of our Mac systems and FinalCutX’s 64bit base speeds.
To preserve render times and keep the machines running smoothly without too many assets to manage, we created in phases, first columns of 13 x 1 then panels of 13 x13 columns, then the celebrity overlay and then a completed panel before sending to AfterEffects for final stitching together and camera movement over what was by then an enormous canvass.
We worked out methods of pasting attributes across large numbers of clips or developing quickly to fix layers so errors could be repaired without needing to render full segments again and ultimately spent a lot of time in front of our screens. The result though speaks for itself. As proud South Africans, we’re all extremely grateful to have been part of such an amazing and uplifting initiative.