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Bringing the beat to the deaf: New video signs John Mayer's 'Waiting on the World to Change'
Sean Forbes doesn't want to wait on the world to change. He doesn't have that much patience.
So last year, the 25-year-old hip-hop fan and aspiring musician from Farmington Hills started D-PAN, the Deaf Performing Artists Network, an organization founded to help deaf and hard-of-hearing people make inroads in the entertainment industry. Forbes himself is hard-of-hearing, after suffering permanent hearing loss at age 1. "You think 'deaf' and 'music,' and it's ironic," says Forbes, a fitted baseball cap resting askew atop his head. "But music is more than just hearing. It's a whole culture."
Though D-PAN is still in its infancy, its impact is already being felt. Co-founder Joel Martin, Eminem's publisher and owner of 54 Sound, the Ferndale studio where Em records, has helped enlist the talents of industry power-hitters such as John Mayer and Christina Aguilera. And D-PAN's first music video, a shot-by-shot re-creation of Fort Minor's emotional 2006 hit "Where'd You Go," filmed in ASL, or American Sign Language, has received more than 64,000 views on the D-PAN Web site and YouTube.
This week, D-PAN's second music video, for Mayer's "Waiting on the World to Change," makes its debut. The Grammy-winning 2006 song (sample lyric: "We see everything that's going wrong with the world and those who lead it/ We just feel like we don't have the means to rise above and beat it/ So we keep waiting, waiting on the world to change") was chosen for its message of hope and change, which resonates deeply within the deaf community.
"When we were asking people about what to do next, this song kept coming up," says Martin, on the Ferndale soundstage where the video was filmed on a simmering Saturday in June. "The response was unbelievable. This song can become an anthem for the deaf community."
A 'protest' video
The "Waiting on the World to Change" video involved months of pre-production, and features more than a dozen members of the deaf community - black, white, old, young, professional actors, amateurs - from around the country signing the lyrics to the song.
On the set of the video, which was filmed entirely in front of a green screen over the course of one 16-hour day, director John Quigley shot take after take of the performers signing the song's earnest lyrics. Quigley, who's helmed videos for Eminem, Tori Amos and more, communicated with his talent via an interpreter.
"I'm way out of my element here," admits Quigley in the middle of the shoot, "but it's a challenge. I dig it." In post-production, various iconic backgrounds - the Hollywood sign, a subway station, images of Washington, D.C. - were added behind the performers to give the clip a worldly feel.
The performances were then inter-cut with quotes about the deaf throughout history and a montage of clips of leaders in the deaf community. Quigley also added shots of instruments being played - drums, guitars - to help give the deaf a sense of the rhythm of the song.
The finished video is striking on several levels - Martin says they're going to send it to MTV for on-air consideration - and it acts to not only empower the deaf community but to educate the hearing on the struggles the deaf have faced throughout history.
"I wanted to make this a protest video," Quigley says, adding it has to be watched three or four times just to catch everything that's going on. "I wanted to show what the deaf community has had to put up with, because there are so many people who know nothing about that world."
A capital 'D'
More than 2 million Americans identify themselves as members of the deaf community.
They experience a range of hearing loss from profoundly deaf to hard-of-hearing to everywhere in between, each with its own degree of hearing ability. Speech habits among the deaf vary just as greatly; some can speak quite well, some sign, some do both, and some can't do either.
These individual distinctions are something about which D-PAN and the deaf community in general - they prefer the capital "D" when it comes to "Deaf" - would like to educate the hearing community.
"It's' important to see people's abilities as individuals. Just because I'm deaf doesn't mean I can't hear everything, and it doesn't mean I can, either," says Ronald Dans, a member of D-PAN's board of directors."There are so many things we can do. The one thing we can't do is hear."
Dans grew up in London, Ontario, and says he suffered a great deal of oppression because of his lack of hearing, "and it's enough," he says. "I want things to change."
He also says that contrary to popular opinion, members of the deaf community derive a great amount of pleasure from music - Dans says he loves the booming bass in hip-hop music. ("Country, I don't get a lot out of that," he admits.) And since music videos are so visual, they can be enjoyed by the deaf community as well. But because closed-captioning only picks up a small percentage of a song - there's no inflection and no emotion in the typed words that scroll across your screen - that left the door wide open for D-PAN to bring their fully-realized, ASL-integrated videos to the table. "My dream for the future is for the music industry to recognize D-PAN," says Dans. "We can have somebody from the deaf community winning a Grammy. It's not out of the realm of possibility."
Building a team
Forbes grew up surrounded by music - his parents are musicians, and his father is one-half of Detroit's successful Forbes Brothers duo - and he never let his lack of hearing hinder his goal of making it in the music industry.
He uses a hearing aid, is an astute lip-reader and is able to communicate with hearing people without the use of an interpreter. That, he says, makes him a perfect liaison between the deaf and the hearing communities.
"I was always stuck in two worlds, the hearing world and the deaf world," says Forbes, who graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y., last year. "I was always in the middle, so I'm like the outsider that can see the bigger picture."
Forbes used that vision to catch the attention of Martin. Forbes had known Martin for years - Forbes' father used to record with him - but Forbes grabbed Martin's attention when he sent him a video of himself signing to Em's smash hit "Lose Yourself."
Martin says he was "mesmerized" by Forbes' ability and the emotion he brought to the performance, and when watching the video he immediately knew Forbes was onto something. (Martin has a tie to the deaf world himself; his brother-in-law, Donald, is deaf.)
"Sean is not only persistent" - Forbes rattled Martin's cage for months before sending him the video - "but he's also really talented," Martin says. "He was the whole spark for this project."
Forbes and Martin formed D-PAN and recruited Scott Guy, a 15-year veteran of the music industry, Dans, the Department Chair for the Interpreter Training Program at Baker College in Auburn Hills, and John Stuckless, a highly accomplished Metro Detroit interpreter, to round out their team.
The company built an online presence with its Web site, D-PAN: The Deaf Performing Artists Network, and its MySpace page, where they have more than 1,100 friends.
Martin's tremendous industry clout provided D-PAN its musical muscle, allowing them to approach artists such as Mayer and Fort Minor.
Paving the way
The "Where'd You Go" video, which was released in September 2006, acted as a soft launch for the nonprofit organization, and the clip - like the Mayer video, was commissioned with the full permission of the artist via a standard licensing deal - garnered an enormous amount of positive feedback from the deaf community.
Sarah Peterson, 23, of Tacoma, Wash., says she was "floored" when she first saw the video.
"I was so impressed that I immediately showed it to my hearing friends, some of my other deaf friends, as well as family," Peterson, who is hard-of-hearing, writes in an e-mail. "D-PAN doing something like this is extremely impressive."
The video's response and the lessons learned from the shoot - Quigley says he cut it in typical music video fashion, ignorant to the fact he was cutting away in the middle of sentences, which made it nearly impossible for the deaf to follow the flow of the song - set the stage for the "Waiting" video.
Making change happen
D-PAN's next project will be a video for the Christina Aguilera song "Beautiful"; Martin has already been in talks with songwriter Linda Perry, who's fully supportive of the project.
Going forward, the organization hopes to compile eight to 10 music videos for a DVD to sell to the general public as early as late 2007. Martin says he also hopes to hire a full staff of workers to carry on D-PAN's goals, and they're looking for help from anyone looking to get involved with the cause.
The key is quality, Martin says. "We're trying to create something that's legit in the marketplace, and this is legitimate as hell," says Martin, who sees D-PAN as a unique marketing opportunity and says he hopes to eventually sell 50,000 DVDs of the D-PAN compilation. He sees the audience as not only members of the deaf community, but hearing people interested in ASL, as well.
He also sees the benefit for the artists involved.
Kriston Pumphrey, 24, of Rochester says the time is right for D-PAN. "Because culture and technology are changing so rapidly, we need to keep up," says Pumphrey, one of the video's hard of hearing performers.
"I think this is awesome, and I'm behind it 100 percent," he says. "The deaf community needs something like this." Forbes, meanwhile, sees himself as a role model for others in the deaf community.
"We need people to stand up and get people moving, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to set up D-PAN and get people involved," he says.
"I always believe the world is run by those who show up," he says. "It's like, show up and do something."
Sean Forbes doesn't want to wait on the world to change. He doesn't have that much patience.
So last year, the 25-year-old hip-hop fan and aspiring musician from Farmington Hills started D-PAN, the Deaf Performing Artists Network, an organization founded to help deaf and hard-of-hearing people make inroads in the entertainment industry. Forbes himself is hard-of-hearing, after suffering permanent hearing loss at age 1. "You think 'deaf' and 'music,' and it's ironic," says Forbes, a fitted baseball cap resting askew atop his head. "But music is more than just hearing. It's a whole culture."
Though D-PAN is still in its infancy, its impact is already being felt. Co-founder Joel Martin, Eminem's publisher and owner of 54 Sound, the Ferndale studio where Em records, has helped enlist the talents of industry power-hitters such as John Mayer and Christina Aguilera. And D-PAN's first music video, a shot-by-shot re-creation of Fort Minor's emotional 2006 hit "Where'd You Go," filmed in ASL, or American Sign Language, has received more than 64,000 views on the D-PAN Web site and YouTube.
This week, D-PAN's second music video, for Mayer's "Waiting on the World to Change," makes its debut. The Grammy-winning 2006 song (sample lyric: "We see everything that's going wrong with the world and those who lead it/ We just feel like we don't have the means to rise above and beat it/ So we keep waiting, waiting on the world to change") was chosen for its message of hope and change, which resonates deeply within the deaf community.
"When we were asking people about what to do next, this song kept coming up," says Martin, on the Ferndale soundstage where the video was filmed on a simmering Saturday in June. "The response was unbelievable. This song can become an anthem for the deaf community."
A 'protest' video
The "Waiting on the World to Change" video involved months of pre-production, and features more than a dozen members of the deaf community - black, white, old, young, professional actors, amateurs - from around the country signing the lyrics to the song.
On the set of the video, which was filmed entirely in front of a green screen over the course of one 16-hour day, director John Quigley shot take after take of the performers signing the song's earnest lyrics. Quigley, who's helmed videos for Eminem, Tori Amos and more, communicated with his talent via an interpreter.
"I'm way out of my element here," admits Quigley in the middle of the shoot, "but it's a challenge. I dig it." In post-production, various iconic backgrounds - the Hollywood sign, a subway station, images of Washington, D.C. - were added behind the performers to give the clip a worldly feel.
The performances were then inter-cut with quotes about the deaf throughout history and a montage of clips of leaders in the deaf community. Quigley also added shots of instruments being played - drums, guitars - to help give the deaf a sense of the rhythm of the song.
The finished video is striking on several levels - Martin says they're going to send it to MTV for on-air consideration - and it acts to not only empower the deaf community but to educate the hearing on the struggles the deaf have faced throughout history.
"I wanted to make this a protest video," Quigley says, adding it has to be watched three or four times just to catch everything that's going on. "I wanted to show what the deaf community has had to put up with, because there are so many people who know nothing about that world."
A capital 'D'
More than 2 million Americans identify themselves as members of the deaf community.
They experience a range of hearing loss from profoundly deaf to hard-of-hearing to everywhere in between, each with its own degree of hearing ability. Speech habits among the deaf vary just as greatly; some can speak quite well, some sign, some do both, and some can't do either.
These individual distinctions are something about which D-PAN and the deaf community in general - they prefer the capital "D" when it comes to "Deaf" - would like to educate the hearing community.
"It's' important to see people's abilities as individuals. Just because I'm deaf doesn't mean I can't hear everything, and it doesn't mean I can, either," says Ronald Dans, a member of D-PAN's board of directors."There are so many things we can do. The one thing we can't do is hear."
Dans grew up in London, Ontario, and says he suffered a great deal of oppression because of his lack of hearing, "and it's enough," he says. "I want things to change."
He also says that contrary to popular opinion, members of the deaf community derive a great amount of pleasure from music - Dans says he loves the booming bass in hip-hop music. ("Country, I don't get a lot out of that," he admits.) And since music videos are so visual, they can be enjoyed by the deaf community as well. But because closed-captioning only picks up a small percentage of a song - there's no inflection and no emotion in the typed words that scroll across your screen - that left the door wide open for D-PAN to bring their fully-realized, ASL-integrated videos to the table. "My dream for the future is for the music industry to recognize D-PAN," says Dans. "We can have somebody from the deaf community winning a Grammy. It's not out of the realm of possibility."
Building a team
Forbes grew up surrounded by music - his parents are musicians, and his father is one-half of Detroit's successful Forbes Brothers duo - and he never let his lack of hearing hinder his goal of making it in the music industry.
He uses a hearing aid, is an astute lip-reader and is able to communicate with hearing people without the use of an interpreter. That, he says, makes him a perfect liaison between the deaf and the hearing communities.
"I was always stuck in two worlds, the hearing world and the deaf world," says Forbes, who graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y., last year. "I was always in the middle, so I'm like the outsider that can see the bigger picture."
Forbes used that vision to catch the attention of Martin. Forbes had known Martin for years - Forbes' father used to record with him - but Forbes grabbed Martin's attention when he sent him a video of himself signing to Em's smash hit "Lose Yourself."
Martin says he was "mesmerized" by Forbes' ability and the emotion he brought to the performance, and when watching the video he immediately knew Forbes was onto something. (Martin has a tie to the deaf world himself; his brother-in-law, Donald, is deaf.)
"Sean is not only persistent" - Forbes rattled Martin's cage for months before sending him the video - "but he's also really talented," Martin says. "He was the whole spark for this project."
Forbes and Martin formed D-PAN and recruited Scott Guy, a 15-year veteran of the music industry, Dans, the Department Chair for the Interpreter Training Program at Baker College in Auburn Hills, and John Stuckless, a highly accomplished Metro Detroit interpreter, to round out their team.
The company built an online presence with its Web site, D-PAN: The Deaf Performing Artists Network, and its MySpace page, where they have more than 1,100 friends.
Martin's tremendous industry clout provided D-PAN its musical muscle, allowing them to approach artists such as Mayer and Fort Minor.
Paving the way
The "Where'd You Go" video, which was released in September 2006, acted as a soft launch for the nonprofit organization, and the clip - like the Mayer video, was commissioned with the full permission of the artist via a standard licensing deal - garnered an enormous amount of positive feedback from the deaf community.
Sarah Peterson, 23, of Tacoma, Wash., says she was "floored" when she first saw the video.
"I was so impressed that I immediately showed it to my hearing friends, some of my other deaf friends, as well as family," Peterson, who is hard-of-hearing, writes in an e-mail. "D-PAN doing something like this is extremely impressive."
The video's response and the lessons learned from the shoot - Quigley says he cut it in typical music video fashion, ignorant to the fact he was cutting away in the middle of sentences, which made it nearly impossible for the deaf to follow the flow of the song - set the stage for the "Waiting" video.
Making change happen
D-PAN's next project will be a video for the Christina Aguilera song "Beautiful"; Martin has already been in talks with songwriter Linda Perry, who's fully supportive of the project.
Going forward, the organization hopes to compile eight to 10 music videos for a DVD to sell to the general public as early as late 2007. Martin says he also hopes to hire a full staff of workers to carry on D-PAN's goals, and they're looking for help from anyone looking to get involved with the cause.
The key is quality, Martin says. "We're trying to create something that's legit in the marketplace, and this is legitimate as hell," says Martin, who sees D-PAN as a unique marketing opportunity and says he hopes to eventually sell 50,000 DVDs of the D-PAN compilation. He sees the audience as not only members of the deaf community, but hearing people interested in ASL, as well.
He also sees the benefit for the artists involved.
Kriston Pumphrey, 24, of Rochester says the time is right for D-PAN. "Because culture and technology are changing so rapidly, we need to keep up," says Pumphrey, one of the video's hard of hearing performers.
"I think this is awesome, and I'm behind it 100 percent," he says. "The deaf community needs something like this." Forbes, meanwhile, sees himself as a role model for others in the deaf community.
"We need people to stand up and get people moving, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to set up D-PAN and get people involved," he says.
"I always believe the world is run by those who show up," he says. "It's like, show up and do something."
