Sunday, January 25, 2009

Bragging

My honorary niece Anna is a dancer in New York and also works as a cheerleading coach at NYU. She recently was given the opportunity to work on a music video for Ryan Starr (who I've never heard of). Anna says:

"He was on the CBS reality show Rockstar: Supernova where he competed to become the lead singer for Supernova. After leaving the show he was signed as a solo artist by Atlantic Records and will be releasing his first studio album soon in 2009. One of his songs from the album has already been featured on the soundtrack to the movie P.S. I Love You."


His first released song for his new album is "Right Now" and when they decided to shoot the video they realized that part of the song lent itself to a cheerleader theme. So they searched around for a choreographer and found Anna. In the end she did more than choreograph, she cast the cheerleaders, found the costumes, conducted rehearsal, and jumped in for a few shots while filming, all of which earned her an associate producer credit. She had some good stories about the shoot when I saw her at Christmas. Since he's just starting out, this was not a big budget shoot. But it still took a lot of effort.

The actual video can be seen here. I'm not sure why it isn't on youtube - it seems like poor marketing to me not to put it on youtube. But here's a "making of" video that is on youtube, Anna is at 1:58 (she will be the dark haired cheerleader on the left):

October Reading

I found myself very impatient in my reading this month and it was in general unsatisfactory.  This may partly be because I was traveling for...