The California Endowment (TCE) is a dedicated nonprofit foundation committed to improving the health and well-being of all Californians. At the end of each year, The California Endowment shares a holiday video message with their partners and community. In 2023, they asked us to produce their most ambitious holiday video yet: an original medley celebrating the uniqueness and diversity of California residents. The result was “Unapologetically Us,” a song and music video that invites Californians to ring in the New Year proud of who they are.
We partnered with award-winning composer Rianjali and TCE partner Music Changing Lives, a nonprofit dedicated to providing music, art, and tutoring programs in America’s public schools and community centers, to create the 2 minute 30 second track, ‘Unapologetically Us’.
The track features fifteen musicians, aged from 16-30 years old, representing a range of ethnicities and genders. Both the song and video are inclusive of artists with disabilities too. It was important for us to highlight diversity not only in the music but also in the musicians we collaborated with.
The track includes a medley of genres: gospel, hip hop, Indian classical, mariachi and reggaeton. In the instrumentation, we featured African drums, Native American flute and percussion, saxophone, trumpet, keys, guitar, and a sound bowl.
The most challenging aspect of creating this track was finding a way to seamlessly blend all of these musical genres together in a respectful and tonally aesthetic way. We went through several iterations of the track before the recording sessions to land the right medley. After the live recording, our composer Rianjali worked with over 50 individual tracks, balancing all the instruments and voices we captured. The final lyrics include verses in English, Spanish and Ghanaian.
Once the track was finalized, we focused on creating the visual aspect of the holiday card–the ‘Unapologetically Us’ music video. Filmed in Los Angeles, we brought together our musicians and multilingual, Los Angeles-Based activist dance troupe CONTRA-TIEMPO, who choreographed and were featured in the video. After the shoot, we faced another challenge: editing the music video to create something dynamic that matched the pacing of the song while combing through several hours of video footage to ship final assets only 2 weeks after filming. The final result, however, was better than we could have imagined.
The holiday card was shared across TCE’s social channels and via email. The musicians also shared organically on their social channels, further amplifying its reach.
In the end, “Unapologetically Us” is a sonic celebration and recognition of many of the communities that make up California. The song and video is an ode to the vision The California Endowment holds for a healthier and more equitable California for All.
Within a two week span, the holiday campaign generated 4.6M impressions, over 865 social media engagements, close to 4M video views across all assets, and had 85% viewing rate. The musicians and dancers also shared organically on their social channels, further amplifying its reach.
