Problems playing this file? See media help.ĪBC's Diane Sawyer conducted a Skype interview with Lavie, asking her motivation for making the video. and they all made their own recordings, and the world therefore put these different (recordings) together."Ī crescendo performed by singers Blair Perkins, Maria Zouroudis, and Lisa Lavie Getting together fifty-seven singers, all over the world. Levs added that "Richard's exactly right. It certainly is a sign of the times and a case of where we are right now." In the second CNN interview that was aired, CNN's Richard Lui remarked "This really is sort of-not to be trite here- we are the world," alluding to the song's title "We Are the World". ĬNN's Josh Levs reported that "a lot of people are telling us that this is better than the celebrity remake. Media coverage Ĭalled "a massive charity collaboration for the digital age" by CTV's national television program Canada AM, within days after it was posted the video became the subject of media attention, including multiple national television features on CNN and a primetime news feature on ABC World News with Diane Sawyer.
CNN's Josh Levs made special note of Lavie's use of YouTube's video annotation feature: her video continually provided successive video annotation hyperlinks to the YouTube channels of the respective contributing singers as their images appeared onscreen throughout the performance. The video was posted as a YouTube "video response" to the 2010 celebrity remake video on YouTube, whose last minute included a video annotation inviting such video responses. The resulting composite vocal and visual segments, combined with the single instrumental backing, constituted the resulting video. The singers then returned their respective vocal video segments to Lavie electronically, for the visual segments to be edited, and the audio to be mixed and edited, over the course of "three days (and) one sleepless night." Lavie specifically pointed out the challenge of mixing the vocal segments, made "tedious" by the segments' different sound levels, recorded in different acoustic environments (bathrooms, kitchens, bedrooms), and made by microphones of different type and quality.
A Radio Canada feature included a video segment of Montréal singer Heidi Jutras' vocal performance, in which she suppressed the instrumental accompaniment by using earphones. After deciding on the assignments of singers to song segments, she sent all the singers the same instrumental backing. In interviews on CNN and ABC World News, Lavie explained how the video was made, given that its 57 contributors would not be performing in the same studio and generally did not even know each other.
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Lavie said that she "was in the car driving and the idea to do a YouTube version of We Are the World popped into (her) head." She determined how to assign portions of the song to respective YouTube singers, by "going to each singer's (YouTube) channel and listen(ing) to their voices to get a better idea of how high or low a singer could sing, if a particular part would sound better with their tonal quality, etc." Lavie conceived, organized, performed in, and with fellow YouTube personality Iman Crosson, co-edited, the video for charity relief of victims of the 2010 Haiti earthquake occurring the month before.