We have recently been working in our Heritelly TV Studio to research, write and produce a video as part of Safer Internet Day 2020, to help promote the positive message of keeping ourselves and our personal information safe when we are online.

Pupils from our Digital Leader team got together with members of our Heddlu Bach to discuss ideas and plan what type of video we would like to make in order to deliver our message.  We went on several websites- such as childnet.com and saferinternet.org.uk to find out as much information as we could, and then began writing down all of our ideas.

We thought about writing a script and making a film, or maybe recording a voice over with key messages on screen. However, after watching some other videos online for inspiration, we finally decided that we would like to write and record a song, to get our message out there and on the internet for others to see.

Firstly, we put all of our ideas together and thought about which parts would be most suitable for the verse and chorus sections, and by doing this we were able to develop a title for our song- ‘Be Safe Online’. 

Once we had written some lyrics, we then moved on to writing the music.  We launched our D.A.W (digital audio workstation) and began looping different beats to find the sound and mood that we were looking for.  We were then able to start experimenting with different instruments and sounds to find which ones worked well together, as we started to build up our song track by track. The lyrics were then edited and rearranged to fit the different sections of the song. 

The next stage was to mix the tracks so that we could begin recording our vocals.  This part was a lot of fun, and we did several takes so that we could choose the best parts from each one, and then the vocals were added to the mix.

The final part of the process was to record some visuals to go with the music.  We wanted to put the lyrics on-screen so that we could help promote our message, but didn’t want to have basic subtitles.  We discussed the idea of producing a lyric video, which then developed into the ‘text bubbles’ idea. It seemed like a great way to get the lyrics on-screen, while staying up to date with current trends.  The final video was then added to our school Twitter feed and uploaded to YouTube, for everyone to view and share.

We all enjoyed working on this project, and it was interesting to learn the process of writing and producing a song. We hope that as many people as possible get to see the video, to help spread this important message.