One afternoon in November, I woke up from a nap with a sudden burst of inspiration. I was going to make a mashup of Beauty and the Beast songs! I had fiddled earlier that week with an arrangement of "Something There" with Chopin's Raindrop Prelude, but now I knew I needed to do a whole slew of songs.
I was excited and got to work finding Chopin pieces that would fit each of the major Beauty and the Beast songs. I quickly ran into a difficulty -- most of the songs were in 4/4 whereas most Chopin was in 3/4. The 4/4 songs were slow and peaceful, and I needed upbeat! I considered branching out to other composers, but I felt like it would lose some of its magic and cohesiveness.
This was also the time that I was feeling sicker and sicker with each passing day, and when I had a free minute to myself I wanted to spend it sitting on the couch instead of practicing. I began to worry. How would it ever come together in time? How would I perfect it in time? I knew the movie wasn't coming out until March, but I wanted to get the movie made well before then. I knew there was a Belle dress and good pianos in Utah, and I wanted to take advantage of them during Christmastime. Besides, if I waited too long I might not even fit into any dress!
I would remind myself of that and gradually chip away at the difficult passages and unnatural key changes until I had something that maybe, just maybe, might be ready to perform when I was with family.
Once in Utah, I practiced more and more, gaining confidence with each run-through. I contacted my aunt Jackie who let me borrow her beautiful dress she had made. Now I had no choice. I had to make the video!
My parents were incredibly helpful. When the bright piles of snow outside made strange glares on the piano, they hung up tablecloths to block some of the windows. My mom worked and worked and worked with my hair to try and get something looking like the movie hair. We spent hours fiddling with camera angles and tripods, testing different cameras and phones to see what would make the best image.
And then when the afternoon was through, we just decided there was too much light in the background, resulting in graininess near my head, and it wasn't going to get any better that day. So we were back to work the next day!
Finally, after so many takes, after finally improving enough that I felt confident in what I was doing, we had a working video! For the first time I ever, I decided to actually say "thanks for watching my video!" which I had promised myself I would never do. People had to see the beautiful dress, after all!
At the end of the day, it might not be the most professional, simply because we didn't have all the equipment for that. But it was great to see a pretty good video come out of a lot of work from a lot of people. After several weeks of wondering if this would ever come to fruition, it was humbling to see it come together.
And after nearly a month of waiting to get closer to the movie's release date, I'm so excited to share it with you! After all, what could be better than Beauty and the Beast and Chopin?
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