The global spread of COVID-19 has resulted in lots of us staying home to “flatten the curve” — limiting social contact in order to reduce the spread of the virus and ease the burden on health workers by. A number of public services have been forced to continue as best they can while staying at home, but city schools are finding the shift to social distancing tricky.

Students, too, have been kept from their daily dose of in-person socializing, extracurricular clubs, and sports teams. So sports drink Pocari Sweat’s recent ad starring a choir of sheltering-in-place junior and high school students has hit a resounding chord across the nation. Pocari Sweat presents “Bokura no Uta” (“Our Own Song”)

The video starts with up-and-coming teen celebrity Yuki Shiotani doing some vocal warm-ups, but she’s quickly joined by a legion of other voices; each dressed in their junior high or high school uniforms, filming themselves with phones angled on selfie-sticks, precariously balanced make-shift tripods or just their own hands.

As their individual voices overlap and harmonize, a piano enters the mix; and each of the video’s many vocalists belts out their part in their bedroom before moving to their veranda. The quick cuts from face-to-face create a wonderful sense of unity and cohesion, even while all its key players are kept far apart. Pocari calls this method of combining individual singing voices a “Neo-Chorus.”

As the song draws to a close, and the words “turn your thirst into power” form over their impassioned faces, each singer raises their phone camera up to the sky — which forms a perfect blue background for the Pocari Sweat logo.

Naturally, ensuring everyone’s voices dovetail perfectly is tough enough when all the singers are in one place. Pocari Sweat’s manufacturer, Otsuka Pharmaceutical, uploaded a short behind-the-scenes movie to demonstrate how the footage for the video was filmed. In it, you can see the singers comment on their favorite parts of the song and the feedback they received, like needing to emote more as they sing or be careful not to trip over lyrics.

Read full story at SoraNews24

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