The first time I heard the version of this song by Home Free I knew I wanted to put it in our show.  The challenge was the fact that the song is acapella which means no music to sequence.  Since the song tells a strong story I could sequence the story instead.  I decided the monster matrix would show images that follow the main character in the story.  The other matrices (two garage matrices, the house matrix and the icicles) would have images and words to provide the details of the story.

Segment Facts

Show: Christmas & Halloween

Introduced: 2019 Christmas, 2024 Halloween

Author: This segment is 99% Stuart with 1% consulting from Julie

Duration: # Minutes

Song: God Bless the USA - written by Lee Greenwood

Atrist: Home Free

Theme/Color

Since the segment has a strong patriotic message we used Red, White and Blue colors and the image of the US flag in many ways.  For the more geographic (moving across the country) it felt right to use green, red and yellow (star).

My Approach to Sequencing

This is the process I used to sequence to the story:

1. I got the Home Free version of the Lyrics

2. I started finding patriotic images, from the web, that would give me ideas for the segment. Note: Since the monster matrix was going to tell the main story, I looked for images that would help me create 42 pixels high by 84 pixels wide images.  If you've never paid attention to image sizes, let me assure you it's not easy to find images that small with any detail.

3. I'm a PowerPoint freak, so I created a document and spread out the lyrics and started pasting in the images.

4. When I had enough images to inspire me, I used MS Paint to start creating my own images to tell the story.  100% of the images in this segment were created by me.  They were inspired by things I found but none of the found images were used in the segment.

5. My next step was to create final PowerPoint slides with the lyrics and my images.  I've provided a couple of examples of these in the images below.

6. Since I use XLIghts to program my matrices, I created a sequence for the song, set up the timings with the Lyrics and added my images to the associated timings.  

7. There were some points in the song where I wanted the display to build up over many steps, so having the lyrics laid out with the images was invaluable.  An example is the places where the song says "God Bless the USA" where I wanted the display to organically focus on each word; "God", "Bless", "the",  "U", "S", "A" all building to finally a single screen that shows it all. To illustrate this, I've included the planning sheet in the images below.

8. The next step is to paste the matrix programming into Light-O-Rama and address the rest of the lights.

Viewer Feedback

When I ask people about their favorite segments, this one is always on the short list.  Comments are always positive.

For the first couple of years, I heard "This isn't a Christmas song" from a lot of viewers.  Initially, I responded with "I don't have a 4th of July show" and that seemed to satisfy them.  

What's with the "VOTE" message.

When I was translating the lyrics to images and got to the "I'd gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today" part, I quickly thought about the military - and that is represented in images throughout the segment - but those of us who are not in the military are still obligated to "stand up" and the way we do that is to vote responsibly.

In 2024 we added a version of the sequence to our Halloween show so it could be seen prior to the Presidential Election.  I also added an Election 2024 page to the web site with the specific purpose of urging people to vote their values in the election.  I received a lot of feedback about that page and most of it was either positive or fairly neutral (like "Thanks for sharing your thoughts.").  One lady, at the Christmas show, said to me "Your website is great.  I read every word on every page and found it informative. As for the election page, I disagreed with every point you made."  I thanked her for sharing her thoughts and we agreed that we weere blessed to lived in a country where it was okay to publicly voice our opinions even if we totally disagreed with eachother.

Singing Monsters

I have always wanted to do singing faces for this song but there's no place in the Christmas version to put the faces because all of the matrices are doing the patriotic/military images.  When we decided to do it for Halloween we had the opportunity to use the monsters.  Kudos to Julie for getting heads-down and sequencing the monsters. We have plans to add more matrix space in the future and we will be able to leverage the work on the monsters to have singing faces for Christmas.  Now, the big decision is to determine what image we'll use for the faces. I've considered stars but there is actually very little space in a star for a face.  I welcome suggestions for a patriotic face.