A Toast to the Frontline

I can’t believe it’s been a year. One year ago today, two crazy med students along with myself published “Stay Inside | A Toast to the Frontline,” a music video paying tribute to the frontline workers of the COVID-19 pandemic. We went through the most incredible journey from start to finish, and I thought today being the anniversary and all might just the time to tell you all about how the final product came to be, and how a passion project like this powered three med students through their toughest trials of med school.

The Pandemic Begins

In March of 2020, the world changed. We were introduced to an incredible danger we knew little of how to protect ourselves from. I had spent the last 4 years of my life working and praying for the chance to become a physician, and finally, after getting the opportunity, I was placed in the medical community during a worldwide pandemic. And I was completely useless to help. I had little to no medical knowledge, and the knowledge I had wasn’t even useful since students weren’t allowed in hospitals to help. All students were told to stay inside, be safe, and wait for further instruction while the physicians we aspired to be were out sacrificing their time and lives for the cause. At the same time, my grandmother’s cancer returned and my grandfather was diagnosed with prostate cancer. My parents were doing everything they could to work and take care them at the same time, but even going to work risked bringing something home to two very susceptible patients. I started traveling back and forth between my windowless apartment and my grandparents to try and help whenever my med school schedule would allow. All of those drives, I thought about the sacrifices my family was making, frontline workers were making, and even individuals with no stake in the game were sacrificing to help do their part by social distancing. I know my family felt unbelievably isolated, but the fact was we were one of many that felt alone.

The Foundation is Set

Throughout my life, music has been my outlet. So at the beginning of quarantine, I began a series called “Tyler’s Tunes,” where I sent small clippets of myself singing/playing various instruments to friends and classmates to try and keep fellow students’ spirits high. But there were other students flocking to music like me, and that’s when I realized that while we couldn’t directly help the frontlines as students, we could provide relief as musicians. 

Rushay Amarath, a fellow classmate, longtime music partner, and incredible friend, and I were two of the heads of “Music in Medicine” at MCG, an organization designed to partner up musicians within allied health as well as use our music to uplift the community around us. We began the “Songs of Comfort” project, a series designed for students, physicians, and anyone else in allied health to share their musical talents with the community and help promote a positive perspective in the midst of an unrelenting time. It was incredible watching musicians across healthcare spread cheer (even if the vids were getting 50-100 views a piece, the views they did receive I knew mattered), and we were thrilled to give them the opportunity to do so.

As the summer was closing, Rushay and I were going to end the project with a special song we had been working on. Since the beginning of quarantine, Rushay and I were forced apart and unable to perform together. The most excruciating part wasn’t being helpless in the fight, but rather watching the world fight over social distancing guidelines while so many frontline workers were sacrificing everything. We were angry. We were giving up. And we were listening to “Runaway” by Kanye quite often. In his song, Kanye calls out everyone on their mistakes (including his own) and promotes how he hopes to move forward in the industry in a powerful melancholy ballad. It was cathartic to indulge in to say the least, but at a certain point I think both Rushay and I realized we were tired of being angry, and tired of being surrounded by negativity. We thought, “what if we flipped the song on it’s head and toasted the people who deserve to be toasted? The nurses, the responders, the teachers, the doctors, everyone and anyone who has made a sacrifice when they didn’t have to in order to help bring the world back to normal.”

The idea struck in our head like lightening and immediately we started texting back and both lyric ideas. Rushay, the musical genius he is, reproduced a version of “Runaway” a bit more in our style for us to sing over. Plain and simply this project began and continued because of Rushay; without his producing skillset we wouldn’t have been able to touch anyone quite the way we did. Fairly soon, we had a simple, sweet version of “Stay Inside | A Toast to the Frontline.” We even attempted to make our own music video, snipping clips from our laptops at our different apartments and stitching them together on iMovie. It was as bad as you could imagine, but that wasn’t the point. We figured it would be a sweet way to end “Songs of Comfort” and put a nice ribbon on the playlist members of our healthcare had passionately created. Unfortunately, our second-to-last video was met with little to no appeal; we realized people were tired of the project, and so we figured dropping another video wouldn’t spread the joy we hoped it would. We sat on it, thinking maybe when this is all said and over, we could release this as an ode to those who helped end the pandemic. Then we met Andy. 

The Idea Reignites

Andy Nguyen, a first-year medical student and videographer was a godsend. He had been running an (at the time) budding successful medical youtube channel for some time before we met him. On his channel, he had a running series called “Wellness Check-ups” where he highlighted medical students on their abilities outside of medicine, not only giving students an avenue to express their gifts but also show his audience the human side of medicine and how important it is to continue cultivating your passions. We are treating people at the end of the day, so it’s crucial we remind ourselves to be human. I decided it would be fun to meld “Tyler’s Tunes” with his wellness project and do a “Christmas Countdown” of holiday tunes. I spent the month placing myself in bizarre scenarios and making a fool of myself to spread some Christmas cheer at a dark time. My grandmother used to be a singer back in the day, so I wanted to get her featured on one of the days when she was cognizant to do so. At the end of it all, I sent the month’s tracks over to Andy, and miraculously he stitched them together in such a professional manner. To my surprise, the video suddenly picked up 300 views, which I shared with my grandmother who was absolutely heartwarmed. I started looking around his channel, and the guy just had an eye that was next level. The fact he was in medical school was a travesty for film and entertainment. Being the son of a long-time musician and worker in the film industry, I could safely say a combination of Rushay’s production talent and Andy’s eye behind the camera would produce a quality on par with a professional music video. The question was just would people care? At this point, Rushay and I realized we had found a partner in crime to express “Stay Inside” in the proper manner it deserved to be presented.

From the first meeting with Andy, it just worked. We knew something great was going to come of this. One of us would throw out a crazy idea like “I’d love to punch the wall and the other pop out” and he would just respond “Oh yeah sure, and we can do ___” and elevate the idea above what we thought was possible. After a few storyboarding meetings, the three of us had a complete visual of how we wanted the video to look. I’ts wild to think about now, but I found out Andy was considering putting up the camera. He was tired of the barrage of content of medical content creators, and he was worried he was adding to the mess. He didn’t feel he was reaching out and helping those the way he wished to, but when I told him how much that “Christmas Countdown” meant to me and my family, to see my grandmother smile and cheer at us on youtube, it reinvigorated the “why” of his channel. He was able to make people feel, no matter how small the gesture. To express a feeling that couldn’t be spoken. This was why he asked if he could dedicate the video to my grandmother. I initially pushed back; as kind as the gesture was, my family’s struggles were unfortunately being shared by families across the country. I didn’t want this message focused on my own situation. But Ammy soon became a symbol for the project, for the revitalization of Andy’s artistic purpose, a stand-in for the patients suffering across the country, and a reason to keep pushing the project forward when we were told to give it up. Now, it was time to do two things: get more pictures of real-time workers for the grand finale, and somehow get admin approval to do the crazy things we had in mind. 

The Roadblocks and Trials
As far as admin was concerned, it took some time to get our point across. To be fair, I think it’s hard for some to hear “music video” and not think of certain images and connotations. In order to help get people on board, a promo needed to be made. We began filming late at night at the medical school (to make sure no one was present and we could mess with lighting). It’s an understatement to say some kind of magic was happening. We talked about how we wanted the music video to look before, but honestly half the shots ended being a combination of in the moment and luck. There was this insane level of chemistry occurring between the three of us, a few times even we couldn’t believe a shot we had just lucked upon. At one point we were trying to film a white swipe at Hammond’s Ferry, so we needed a white backdrop. After one restaurant with a white wall for the swipe denied us filming on site, the restaurant across the street came to our aid. We found a white towel in our bookbag and like maniacs had one person hold it up in the middle of the intersection, one person hold the camera while blasting the song from our phone, and the third acting on screen like everything was normal. It needs to be said that none of this could have been possible without the enumerable help we received throughout the project (Manuel’s jumping to our aid and giving us a table and champagne glasses for a second shot, our building manager going above and beyond to give us access to places we only dreamt of shooting, and the countless individuals who shared their stories and photos with us). That being said, everything seen and heard in this video was planned, produced, and edited by three medical students in the midst of a medical school curriculum. That meant keeping up with studies and exams, research, volunteer work and clinic, on top of everything else. It was in the brief moments we could escape away (or in the hours we decided not to sleep) that this project was made. 

Pretty soon, we had a functional promo for the video, and people were able to see a glimpse of the message we were trying to tell. This started a two-month long process of working with administration in attempts to make this video as emotionally impactful as possible. After cutting a lot of red tape, we rallied a solid support network. We even ripped a small hole in the side of the first-floor wall during a shoot, and admin just told us “pretend like it was always there.” It seemed like everything was going in our direction, just in time for our last idea: the roof. From the start, we had this image of a rotating shot at the climax of thanking frontline workers that ended with us falling through the floor into the inside of a building to illustrate the final push we needed people to feel: be safe as we close out this pandemic. And we knew the roof of the medical school would be perfect for the shot. That day of shooting required us to be at our absolute A-game: we needed to prep exactly what we were shooting, where, and when as once we got up to the roof, we only had a golden hour to get all of the shots we needed. Somehow, we got it. Before packing up, I think all of us took a breath for the first time in months realizing just what we had accomplished. We sat down, looked at the sunset, and listened to “River” by Leon Bridges while thinking about how lucky we were to be up there and how close we were to being done. It had only been on our minds every day for nearly a year at this point, and it was soon coming to a close. Our wildest ideas were coming to fruition, and for the first time we thought “This might actually be something good.”

As far as the photos went, we started with 6 photos when it was just Rushay and I., However, once Andy came into play, our aspirations grew with his vision. We started reaching out to everyone we knew in medicine: old undergraduate friends, fellow medical students at different institutions, cold calling hospital systems, responder units, schools and more. Then one day, it ran away. I’ll never forget getting a text from a surgeon out in Arkansas with several pictures to use saying he was so excited to help out in any way he could with the project. I never reached out to the man, and that’s when I realized our project and its message had spread just as we dreamt it could. We received photos from over 45 different hospital systems, universities, responder units, schools, and more sources from Florida to Alaska and everything in between. We were overwhelmed by the support we were receiving nationally; never did we think we’d be able to reach frontline workers on this magnitude. With this growing support and word of mouth of our project, we even were able to get the CDC involved (a dream of ours as we are Georgia’s premiere public medical school and the CDC has been leading the fight on the frontline since day 1). Another week of editing and pulling out our hair in preparation, and the video was ready to drop.

The Response

March 21st, 2021, nearly a year to the day of when the WHO declared a pandemic, we released “Stay Inside | A Toast to the Frontline.” The immediate response was like a dream. The three of us were getting flooded with calls, texts, and emails from friends and family, those we knew in healthcare, and most wonderfully from those we had never met. A random kindergarten teacher describing how hard her last year had been and how thankful she was for this. A family med clinic across the country who felt heard after a year of pain. This was what we worked for, and it was finally happening. We reached about 5 thousand views in the first week with a decent response on socials as well, and before we knew it the news wanted to cover the story. At first WJBF Channel 6 came to speak to us about the piece, followed by Augusta University Jagwire. The following week WRDW Channel 12 and 26 came by to spread our message, along with the Augusta Press and WFXG. Our video was being spread not only locally, but across Georgia through the Resilient Georgia Newsletter, a statewide newsletter followed by members across allied health. The dean of our Medical School wrote about us in the “Dean’s Diary” and our own school was pubbing us across platforms.

I’ll never forget when ABC called us saying they loved the message and wanted to air it nationally. Primetime. One problem…they just needed to check in with Kanye’s Lawyers first. Kanye. At that point my ears went numb; I knew I had to be dreaming. There was absolutely no way this was happening, and when they called back to say Kanye’s team approved the use of the song on ABC, I still felt my ears were ringing. We were living in a dream. Unfortunately, the segment had to be pulled at the last minute and wasn’t aired, but just having Kanye’s approval was fine enough for me. Did I mention, Kanye?

The Message

The project didn’t just exceed our wildest expectations; it did everything we were crazy enough to dream of a year previously sitting in our apartments alone. We were of no use to the frontline and dampening the curve, but we were able to reach out to frontline workers across the country to let them know they weren’t alone. We were able to let them know it wasn’t for nothing, and they were the reason we even had a shot of returning to a semblance of the way the world used to be. This was a toast to those who placed their self-interests aside and put their lives on the line to make our world a safer place. This was a toast to the teacher, the doctor the nurse. A toast to the student, the postman, the small business owner barely getting by because they were adhering to safety guidelines. This was a toast to the mothers and fathers who became teachers and physicians of their own over-night. It’s just a music video, let’s not make it out to something that it isn’t. But a mantra I fully live by is while medicine is what keeps us alive, music is what we stay alive for. Music heals where medications cannot, and it gives peace and comfort when it feels as if everything is crumbling around us. We just wanted to say thank you to anyone who would hear it, and we were incredibly blessed to be able to reach out to the numbers that we did. Andy said it best when he said “If all that people remember from this project is a viral music video, then we failed to do our job.” The numbers were great to see, but I will never forget the emails and calls of those I’ve never met who said the video helped them feel appreciated for all they were doing. That was the purpose, that was the goal, and all the miniscule sacrifices we made as a trio compared to sacrifices of those we were trying to honor were more than worth it. The emotions we tried to portray (feeling alone, tired, unheard), we were trying to encapsulate the feeling of the frontline worker to not only express to the public the hidden heroes working amongst them, but to let those heroes know they were not alone.

So, besides this being the anniversary, I wanted to share this to remind you all how important it is to cultivate your passions outside of medicine as you continue forwards in medicine. The three of us absolutely embarked on this journey to help workers feel appreciated, but we spent more time than we probably needed to in areas of the project because we were on fire for it. A lot of small details, little moments in the video that no one probably would ever notice (my favorite being the use of Alicia Keys piano in the outro song) are scattered throughout the video. All that shows is how much we loved what we were doing. As much as the video was to help others, it was helping us stay sane during a dark time in our education. Please, please, please continue whatever makes you feel human. Your patients will feel that in you, and they’ll be better of for it. As will you. I’ll never forget this video, not only for the joy it gave my grandmother in her final days, but for the joy it gave me to work with two incredible guys doing what we loved.

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