Interview with Ryan L'Esperance - On board the John Lennon educational tour bus in Yukon, Oklahoma
The John Lennon educational tour bus is a completely portable recording studio. Students from the Yukon public schools had the opportunity to record on the bus and shoot a music video as well.
Ryan spends about 10 months out of the year aboard the bus, giving kids hands-on experience and advice on multimedia and audio recording and production. He started off in music production, and now he wants to do everything that has to do with multimedia production and recording. Ryan is editing and putting the kids' project together, as well as teaching them about what he's doing. He said the most challenging thing to coordinate is getting large groups of kids to collaborate, break out of their shells, and let their creativity out. The most rewarding part is getting kids to show their talents and individual creativity through all this great technology and media, as well as getting these kids' ideas out there to hopefully promote themselves and their craft. The challenges associated with working on the bus are (obviously) space limitations. However, there are three separate studios on the bus: front is video production studio, the middle is the audio production suite, and the rear studio is an isolated vocal booth as well as a 370 degree green screen. There are also living quarters aboard the bus for the staff. You have to be an engineer, a producer, a maid, a roommate, so it's kid of hard to find people to work on the bus. It is one of the tougher lifestyles because you really have to have the technical skills as well as very personable social skills who are willing to put up with the somewhat grueling conditions. This is a great program, it fosters immense creativity, and it provides opportunities for expression that some kids might not otherwise get.
The Black Eyed Peas, Natasha Beddingfield, and Will.i.am work on the bus a lot, as well as a few up and coming artists.
No comments:
Post a Comment