Media & Music: A Student's Perspective

My name is Nick Ercoli and I am involved in the production of the movie and the recording of the music scoring of the film. I am a junior at Fleetwood Area High School and I play the bass trombone. It was an awesome experience to be able to participate in the recording of the music for a movie. Music has a huge impact on my life and this is one of the most memorable events of my music career.Music isn’t the only part that I helped do in this project, I was much more involved in the production of the movie. After the original trailer for the movie was released, a couple students and I were interviewed for our opinions on the film and what all we have done to help perfect this project. The students in my TV Media II class and I helped to transcribe the script of the movie, which was an extremely tedious task. After hours of work we realized that we weren’t near being done! Which made us realize how big of a project this really is.

The coolest part of transcribing was getting to learn Frank Grunwald’s story from the raw footage with nothing edited out. The story is more than tragic, it’s life changing, it makes you realize how horrible people can be and how easy we have it in our lives. We’ve learned about the Holocaust countless times in school, but you don’t get the full effect like hearing it from an actual victim.

Another really interesting part of the production was getting to hunt through all of the stock footage of the Holocaust on the Holocaust Memorial Museum website. I’ve never viewed raw footage of what went on in the camps and during the liberations before going onto that website. A lot of the footage that I was able to view was disturbing and gruesome, but there was also a lot of surprising footage of the prisoners playing instruments and trying to stay as positive as possible to survive.

Overall the entire experience is one that will never happen again in my life and I am so grateful that I was able to be a part of it. I think the film is accomplishing something much bigger than we all think it is, and everyone who was able to be part of it should know that it isn’t just some movie, it’s a life changing experience.