Picking up on an AP story, the Chicago Sun-Times posted the now-infamous video of a group of kids singing about Sen. Barack Obama (paragraph breaks removed):
A video featuring children singing a song in tribute to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is a hit on YouTube, garnering 596,000-plus views in just one version. Obama's critics have ripped the song, comparing it to a video of North Korean children singing to their dictator. Supporters defend it as just cute children singing. Judge for yourself.
Nowhere in the brief Web site posting did the Sun-Times or the AP note that professional Hollywood expertise went into the production of the video. As blogger Bob Owens noted at Confederate Yankee:
While described as a grassroots effort, Kathy Sawada, who posted the video and can been seen directing the children in the video, is a bit more than just an enthusiastic music teacher you might find in your average public school.
Sawada is a teacher at an elite and expensive Colburn School of Performing Arts in Los Angeles as part of the Piano faculty. Colburn just built a $120 million 12-story high-rise addition for their musicians.
Does a concert-quality musician in an elite school in the middle of the most ego-centric city in the United States count as a "grassroots" effort?
Here's a partial list of those who helped produce this "grassroots" effort:
- Jeff Zucker - Gaffer, Chief Lighting Technician in Boogie Nights.
- Post-producer (former choreographer?) Holly Shiffer.
- Motion picture camera operator/steadicam specialist Peter Rosenfeld (appropriately enough, worked in Yes Man, a movie about " a guy challenges himself to say 'yes' to everything for an entire year."
- Darin Moran, another motion picture industry professional, who just finished filming - how appropriate - Land of the Lost.
- Andy Blumenthal, Hollywood film editor.
And here's the video in question:
