Blue Sky came and went again for the third time in my high school career and it’s definitely not getting easier. As the drill goes, we are given a theme/topic to base our Blue Sky projects off of and usually, what we can do with the given topics is quite broad. The same goes for this year, but things were changed up. For starters, the Grade 8s, 9s, and 11s were all given different topics to base our projects on. In the case for us grade 9s, we were assigned Harry Potter, which definitely put a smile on many people’s faces… except mine. I’ve already gotten a lot of hate for being so late on the Harry Potter train, so I knew I had to do some reading (movie watching) to catch up on all the things I was missing. So I watched some of the movies, racking my brain on project ideas, but I never came up with ones that I really liked, but then I took a simpler approach and thought about some skills that I could implement into my project. One of the first things that came to mind for me was music and being able to play guitar and a little bit of piano. As soon as I thought of that, I knew I had to do the theme from Harry Potter and mix it into different genres of music. I came up with a few genres of music which would be interesting to remake. Those were…

-Rock

-Reggae

-Electric

I then looked at some compilations of songs from each genre until I found a basic pattern for each genre. These genres seemed pretty simple to remake and in theory, they are. Being an amateur music producer though and only having access to some basic music making programs, I found a lot more challenge in making the music than I thought. I was originally hoping to do live recordings with my guitar and piano and build the music off of those recordings, but there was trouble in matching the quality of sound from my recordings to those in the music making programs. I ended up using fretboards on Garageband for the guitars and bass and the keyboards for, well, the keyboards.

I found it easiest to start each genre with the drums and bass lines as drumming and bass patterns were pretty easy to pick up in each genre. Rock and reggae both had pretty solid and predictable patterns. Rock was fast paced and loud while reggae was definitely much slower and soft and could be played around loosely with the lead instruments. As for electro, bass lines and leads were practically in sync and the drums were a collection of snare, claps, and bass all at a fast tempo. I spent a good amount of time analyzing and editing parts of each song and I came to an unfortunate conclusion when it came to the electro version of the Harry Potter theme.

Being my first time making music, I didn’t expect to make a masterpiece of electro Harry Potter, but the problem was, on top of it not sounding good, it didn’t even sound like electric music, so I decided for my sake and the listener’s sake to leave that out of my final project. What I was left with was two songs that turned out to sound more like their appropriated genres so I decided that they were good to show during Blue Sky night. Once I was finished with the rock and reggae songs, I was ready to show them with their own little listening area, but for you readers, it’ll be right here…

By the time the big night came around, all of us where running around trying to get our areas in order. For those who weren’t there, there were five different groups in the Harry Potter exhibit: Dumbledore’s office, the Forbidden Forest, the Gryffindor common room, a dungeon, and the Great Hall. My group was Dumbledore’s office so we got a large table that could easily sit six people and filled it with things you could find in Dumbledore’s office such as candy in a bowl, old literature works, a quill and ink, the sieve, etc. We had also made large paper walls with paper picture frames glued onto them with our projects being shown on our iPads behind the paper to recreate the moving paintings in the books and movies. There was also an interactive and food element we had to add to our area, so we came up with a game that also brought in a food element into it…

Quidditch Pong… 

It took a lot of convincing for it to get approved, so I was pretty happy when we were given the go-ahead for Quidditch Pong. Essentially what we did was make three of the gold rings that Quidditch players threw different things through to earn points. They were made out of badminton rackets and yellow electrical tape. We covered the game table in green paper to recreate the grassy fields used in Quidditch and just plain ping-pong balls and some red solo cups. If you bounced a ping-pong ball off the table, through the hoop, and into one of the cups, you would win a “Magic Wizard Juice!” I’m pretty proud to say that it was a big hit among kids and adults alike.

All in all, I feel it was a pretty successful night for all of us in PLP, and was definitely much easier as we got more time to set up than last year. I enjoyed working on this Blue Sky project and am excited to see what we’re going to do at the end of this year for the Summer Exhibition, but until then, this is goodbye!