About two months ago, right after the BET Awards, I received a tweet from an Aaliyah fan who was appalled that Aaliyah wasn’t given a 10 year anniversary tribute during this year’s BET Awards. They felt as though she had been ‘forgotten’ and they asked me to blog about it.
Instead, I made the decision that I would put together a proper tribute. So I pulled my team together and said, ‘We have to do something for Aaliyah…and we have less than 8 weeks to pull it together’. My initial idea was to put together a piece that included celebrity interviews as well as a montage of her videos, interviews and performances to not only remind fans, what an amazing artist she was, but also to introduce younger fans of the site to her music, videos and past performances.
The biggest issue we faced in producing the piece was that we had just come off of one of the biggest Award show weekends where we had access to plenty of artists but we missed out on the opportunity to interview them for the tribute. We were now starting from scratch. Four weeks went by and our planned tribute video looked as though it was about to fall through the cracks. There were so many obstacles involved with creating it and most of the artists we attempted to contact were either on tour, out of the country or on some sort of vacation. Patrick, my videographer turned to me one day and said, ‘Don’t worry Necole, we are going to get it done. It’s going to work out.’, so I said to him, ‘okay, you are absolutely right. Let’s do it!!’. Teamwork definitely makes the dream work! I told Lauren, the site’s correspondent and co-producer, “When we are out at events, on the red carpet, at an appearance…no matter what it is, ask everyone you can think of how they felt about Aaliyah’…so she did. The outcome of asking artists/celebs on the spot, their feelings about Aaliyah made for very honest, genuine commentary that made the piece so much more better.
Two days before the anniversary of her death, we began to edit the project and the morning we had planned to release the video, we were still editing it. I remember Aaliyah fans were leaving angry comments stating that they couldn’t believe I didn’t post on Aaliyah yet and how could I have forgotten her 10 year anniversary. Meanwhile, we were busting our butts to get the video up. All of the added pressure was making us very nervous…
The final outcome blew me away. It was so gratifying. So honest. It almost made me feel as though I personally knew her. Deep down, I felt as though it would have made her smile, if she was here to see it.
RIP Aaliyah. You are deeply missed

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