Grace

Chapter 36

Dan and Clara came with me to set up the music room for the video shoot. Master Carter was in the room to, intrigued more than anything I thought. We moved instruments around the room trying to come up with an interesting configuration but settling for a standard band formation with drums at the back, brass to the side, guitars and keyboard in their usual places and me in the middle at the front. It was when we were about done that everyone else turned up.

Everyone went straight over to their instruments and then they all turned to me.

And this wasn't what I'd thought about. When I'd recorded the trumpet piece just before Christmas I'd followed direction from Rafa. I was just the person playing the instrument, he was the leader. Well, now I was the leader. Right. Ok.

"Uh..."

Oh yeah, Grace, that was eloquent.

"How about you give us a few moments to warm up and run through the song and then, uh, I guess we'll take it from there?" I asked everyone flicking my gaze from the school camera crew, my camera crew, Master Carter and finally the musicians.

Everyone nodded and made comments of agreement. I turned to Clara and told her to begin when she was ready. It took a couple of runs to get the song to some sort of standard where we could do some recording. The school camera crew (led by a guy called Alfred) recorded the whole time anyway possibly so that they could warm up and get a feel for the way things were going to run.

Then we spent the entire three hours recording, doing small sections over and over again and playing around with the idea of ripping up twitter hate messages. Some I ripped and simply tossed into the air, others I put in the trumpets of the brass instruments and the players blew them out across the room and towards the ceiling. I put a few on the drums – manned by Clara – and she either whacked the drum or opened and closed her hi-hat. We also used the fan that Master Carter on his desk and blew a load of messages across the room.

Part way through one of the camera people had an idea, dashed out and only came back forty minutes later with a about two packets worth of paper in his arms. There were a bunch of different colours and he was grinning to himself.

"Going to let us in on the secret yet?" Alfred asked.

"I've got a bunch of different tweets on these," he said and showed us a few examples. "I figure we should do a whole song with bits of paper floating around. It's going to take a lot of resetting, but it'll look cool."

"It's also going to take a lot of cleaning up," Master Carter informed us.

"Yeah, but it's also gonna be a lot of fun," I said.

It took all of us maybe about half and hour to rip up the paper and put into a bin. The whole time one of the camera club guys recorded it and my camera crew recorded him recording us. I didn't read any of the tweets as I ripped them up, I didn't think anyone did. When we finished and saw how little paper we actually had I looked to Alfred.

"We can CGI add some in," he shrugged.

That part of the video took the longest. We were constantly stopping and starting and collecting all the paper up. It took forever to get through the song just once, but I trusted Alfred when he said it would look good. We played around with some different ideas and then agreed that we needed to do some filming in different locations around school tomorrow.

We talked about the different locations and what we could do in them as we tidied everything away and then went our separate ways for the day. I held Ben's hand all the way back home and basked in the simple simplicity of the contact. I loved the way I felt warm when I was with him, warm on the inside and so relaxed I could quite happily sit in a quiet room doing nothing with him. Just sitting there and still thinking myself the luckiest person alive right now.