VOPERA, awards, and thoughts on impostor syndrome

The dust has settled on last night, and I’m so proud to have been part of this project, this team, this completely bonkers grass-roots film. VOPERA won an RPS Award!

Working on L’Enfant was a huge part of my pandemic experience. I could write a tonne about the process, the people, and it still wouldn’t scratch the surface. I will, however, fling some thoughts out into this social media void, because I want to get them off my chest.

This single project marked the death of my impostor syndrome. I’d carried it with me for years, since getting into music college having had no formal musical education. I always felt like a bit of a fraud, surrounded by people who were better musicians than me. I then, half by accident, drifted into the world of recording and filming my peers, colleagues, and friends. I charged money for it (mostly to buy better gear), and then strangers started emailing, because they’d seen my work, or had been told about it. 

That’s when impostor syndrome reared its head again, just as I was starting to think of myself as a legitimate singer / decent musician. Suddenly I had a side hustle (now a proper small business) in a field I had even less formal training in. I was learning as I went, from my own mistakes, from online resources, from books; panicking before every session that wasn’t voice and piano. But I took on nearly every project I was asked to record or film, mostly to learn and grow, but also to supplement my income as my singing career stalled. I was asked to do things because back then there weren’t that many small outfits doing this kind of work, and as an ‘impostor’, I pitched myself as a cheap option. 

Before I knew it, I had stopped auditioning as a singer. I was still singing, still getting work off the back of old auditions, the grapevine, drop-outs, etc; but I decided that I wanted a break from auditions, because they were mentally crippling for me. And I had my recording business, where people (a lot of them) wanted to work with me. I was one of the go-to guys for opera demos, and there was a variety of other recording/filming work that kept things interesting too. 

I still felt like a bit of a fraud, though.

And then 2020 happened. I tried to get various things off the ground in lockdown, but I’m no trend-setter, or leader, or inspirational figure. But I participated in any projects that I could - Bite-Sized Proms (congrats to Jennifer Johnston for her RPS Award!), editing virtual choirs, various things for Bradley Travis at ETO, and two filmed operas (I’d never done an actual film before) - Orfeo for IN Series, and Bhekizizwe for Opera’r Ddraig, both incredible experiences in their own way, both hugely challenging as well.

Near the beginning of that weird time, Jamie Hall brought me in on the ground floor of an idea. He said something to the effect of ‘you should meet Rachael Hewer, she has ideas and she makes them happen’. And so a Zoom call was arranged. 

I don’t think I’d realised how big this thing was going to be until I had to block out about a week to host online tutorials for all the singers on how to record and film themselves at home. There were so many faces! Then I was assisting Myles Eastwood recording the LPO, and watching him work was a privilege, and an inspiration. And he treated me, a singer, like a peer. I loved those 2 days.

And then the files started coming in, and it was time to mix the thing, and it was my job to turn a beautiful recording of the LPO and over a hundred recordings made on phones, Zoom recorders, and the like, into a proper soundtrack. 

It was not easy. It went wrong a few times, and I had to go back to the drawing board. It was all-consuming for a time. I had help, though! Lee Reynolds, our conductor/MD, his vision and his notes kept the bar for me high, sometimes frustratingly so, but he was right to push me, right to not let things be ‘fine’. He also brought in Owen Stavenuiter, without whose help editing the chorus tracks we would never have made the deadline. There was a point where we hit a bit of a brick wall, and Myles came back to have a look at the mix and offered some tips to get us over the line. In the end, we did it. I did it.

I can’t stress enough how much I learnt from the process of VOPERA. The most important lesson was that my voice is valid, as are my skills. While some of the pitfalls of the mixing process were to do with the sheer technical difficulty of the material we were working with, some were to do with me not backing my own vision, or not being able to persuade others to why I believed a certain approach was the right one. Learning to better articulate my opinion and my process, and perhaps not to send incremental drafts before they’re fully formed, but also to stand my ground on occasion… these lessons I get to keep.

I also get to keep a sequence of every draft version, to remind me of the journey, and where we doubled back after going down a rabbit hole… at least I hope I get to keep them, as my computer died the other day, and I haven’t been brave enough to check if tangential-work-product-memorabilia was in a properly backed up folder, or not. 

Finally, I get to shed my impostor syndrome. L’Enfant sounds good. My productions since then sound better than ever. My confidence in dealing with various recording scenarios is in a place where planning days are a calm affair, rather than a ‘what if they realise I don’t know what I’m doing?’ nightmare. 

I know what I’m doing. I know I do a lot of things slightly unconventionally, too. But people hire me for how my stuff sounds, so there’s obviously something I bring to the table outside of the ‘conventional’. 

It’s thanks to VOPERA, and I know I’m not the only one whose skills, old or new, got immeasurable validation thanks to L’Enfant. A lot of amazing art got made, against the odds, in 2020, and if each of those projects had a similar impact on its participants, I believe that a great many lives were changed for the better thanks to that art. It won’t bring back lives, it might not bring back livelihoods (but, then again, it might), but it does give me hope. 

RPS Award in the hands of some of VOPERA's keyboard warriors: myself (sound), Jamie Hall (cinematography and VFX), 

and Sasha Balmazi-Owen (additional VFX)

Thank you to everyone at VOPERA, and everyone I got to create stuff with over the past way-too-many-months, and to everyone who watched it all. And, if you made it this far, thank you for reading.