Winning UNCRC Rap! Our Story
We are Bethan Yapp and Ffion Evans, writing about our successful UNCRC Participation Rap, what we did to succeed, and what’s happened since the release.
The English and Welsh rap includes us two, Corey Beavis, Liam Beavis, George Connelly, Callum Harding and Scott Bevan, and it all started Easter time, 2010. The 7 of us volunteered to Leoni Horton (Community Focused Schools) and Ve Van de Voorde (Vale Participation Officer) at our school to participate, although we had no idea on what we’d be doing! But we learnt all about the UNCRC (The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child), the 7 important standards, Keith Towler (Children’s Commissioner for Wales) and of course our rap that we were about to create.
The progress started off slow, when we stayed after school to come up with lyrics, but in time, everybody got into the swing. During the Easter holidays, we spent a whole day in Area 41 in Barry writing the rap. It took a lot of hard work, but in the end, we’d done it. The next day we returned to Area 41, where we recorded the rap in a professional studio. It was great fun, and we all had a new experience that was out of the ordinary for us! Our cameraman, Leo James (Vibe Creative), started to film us and record our lyrics in the studio, to include some clips in the final production.
During the second week of our school holidays, we spent two days filming the rap, with one day in the V-POD, another in our school drama department. At first, none of us were confident enough to act up in front of the camera, and everyone was quiet and shy, which is completely out of the ordinary for us all! The Vibe V-POD was great fun, because none of us had ever been in such a cool bus before, and we were that bus’ first visitors! It was such fun, and again, something new we could tell everyone about.
The second half of the filming took place in our school drama department, Ysgol Gyfun Bro Morgannwg, a Welsh medium school situated in Barry. By then we were confident as ever in front of the camera, and they had more than enough shots of us rapping along! We took the opportunity as a bit of fun, and we had no idea how good it actually was, and we didn’t expect that it would be a success around South Wales or all Wales at all! When we went to see it the launch, we thought of it as good, but not great. I (Ffion) was laughing throughout it, because at first it was hilarious, as did everyone else in the room.
We had another launch, in our school too. We were nervous about what everyone in our year would think of it, whether they’d like it or not, but fortunately they did, and so did Keith Towler and many other important people that came along to watch! I (Bethan) was relieved that it was a success.
Although people liked the rap and it had had thousands of views on YouTube and Swoosh, we weren’t completely persuaded that it was seriously good. Not until of course, it was nominated for an award.
We had been nominated in the Participation and Citizenship award at the 31st Vale of Glamorgan Youth Awards at Barry Memorial Hall. Even though we didn’t win it, it felt great to be nominated, and was an honour getting up on stage.
We got put up for another UNCRC Award linked with CLIC, at the Senedd down in Cardiff Bay. The award was the Regional Award for 11-25 year olds. We were sitting there in the audience, waiting anxiously, hearing loads of names being called out to get their awards, but we would never have guessed that our Vale Youth Group would get called out. We won!
Making the rap has been such an amazing privilege, as we got to experience new things and meet lots of new and important people. Even though all seven of us find the video comical, there is quite a serious message to young people everywhere, reassuring them that they can have their say, and that their voice and opinion can be heard in all kind of circumstances, whether the matter is big or small.
Thank you
Bethan and Ffion
You can read more about the UNCRC Participation Rap by CLICKING HERE
You can read more about the UNCRC and CLIC Award by CLICKING HERE
You can see all the official CLIConline photos from the UNCRC event by CLICKING HERE
