This is a guest post from Stephanie Vasquez, a student at Park Slope Education Complex at M.S. 88, the school that won Best Music Video in our energy competition.

The purpose for creating the video was to show people that saving energy is important in the world we live it. If we can change our simple behaviors, like turning off the lights, we can impact our world tremendously.

Energy conservation means everything to me. Saving energy and electricity is important because if it is helping the Earth we live in, it is helping us, giving us cleaner air and a healthier future.

The process of making this video took some time. We started off with learning about a parody. A parody is when you base an art form off of an original piece, but you change around things to make a social critique or pose fun. Even though our song is serious, we based our video on “All of the Lights,” by Kanye West. Then came syllables. In order to create lyrics, we had to sound out the syllables do that our lyrics could fit the lyrics and frame of the original song. Ms. Kerner provided us with readings about energy conservation, but we also used what we learned from ACE and Solar One to write our lyrics! We wrote scenes and filmed student’s actions based on the lyrics of our song. Then we chose students for different jobs in the production of our video. Picking roles for each student was easy. Ms. Kerner and Ms. Lopez asked the students what they wanted to do, and matched our skills and interests with the roles. We then filmed the scenes.

In our project, we also got to travel to a real recording studio called Jambox Entertainment in New York City! The recording studio was amazing. Ms. Kerne took 7 students, 6 singers and a guitarist to record at the studio. Then we each got to sing our parts. I was even one of the lucky students to get to sing at the studio! It was absolutely amazing how the lady at the studio mashed our voices together. The final product was awesome.

All in all our video took a lot of effort but was a great success!

(And if you haven’t seen it yet, watch their winning video.)