"We Are the World 25 for Haiti (YouTube Edition)" | ||
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Single by 57 YouTube musicians | ||
Released | February 20, 2010 | |
Format |
YouTube video (360p, 480p, 720p-HD) |
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Genre | Pop | |
Length | 7:30 | |
Writer(s) |
Michael Jackson Lionel Richie |
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Producer(s) |
Lisa Lavie (collaboration) / |
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Music video | ||
"We Are the World 25 For Haiti (YouTube Edition)" on YouTube |
Lisa Lavie (collaboration) /
Lisa Lavie and Iman Crosson (co-editing)
"We Are the World 25 for Haiti (YouTube Edition)" is a collaborative charity song and music video produced by singer-songwriter Lisa Lavie and posted to the YouTube video sharing website to raise money for victims of the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake.
The video was created as a response to the celebrity remake "We Are the World 25 for Haiti" that was released eight days earlier, and is a cover of "We Are the World", the 1985 charity single produced in support of famine relief in Africa.
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.
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."
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. After deciding on the assignments of singers to song segments, she sent all the singers the same instrumental backing. 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. 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. The resulting composite vocal and visual segments, combined with the single instrumental backing, constituted the resulting video.