During the break, to ensure the two black-lacquer Yamaha grand pianos look their best on screen, Veda C. Storey removes her pink blazer and uses it to polish off the handprints left behind by her children.

The pianos are on loan. With their lids removed, they’re aligned so the player at the keyboard of one can look across both instruments to face the person playing the other.

When shooting is about to begin again, in front of the 24-inch-thick acrylic wall of the Ocean Voyager exhibit at the Georgia Aquarium, one of four whale sharks in the 6.3 million-gallon tank begins to approach. It’s coming up on Ivy Catherine’s right and Keenan’s left. They don’t have long if they want to catch the animal in the shot.

Keenan checks with the cameraman.

“Are you recording?”

He gets the nod. With his hands on the keys, he looks across the pianos to face his sister. The music begins.

For four more hours, the seven children of the Rogers-Storey family have the exhibit, with its 61-by-23-foot viewing window, to themselves to film their latest YouTube video. Set to the music of “The Little Mermaid,” green sea turtles, blue tang surgeonfish, banded butterfly fish and, of course, mammoth whale sharks provide an aquatic backdrop while the kids perform with their mom and dad watching — and sometimes filming with their cellphones — from behind a railing a few feet away.

Shoots like this one in October combine the children’s myriad interests — film, theater and performance — but start with their enduring relationship with music, which Storey fostered from a young age.

She began her own training later than many, but that hasn’t stopped Storey from excelling as a musician and making practice and performance an integral part of her and her children’s lives. To stay in top form, she maintains a strict daily practice schedule.

She holds a degree from Canada’s prestigious Royal Conservatory of Music at the University of Toronto and has performed for audiences of thousands. But Storey is also an award-winning professor in the J. Mack Robinson College of Business with a record of academic success dating back more than two decades.

Growing up on Prince Edward Island, Canada, Storey studied piano, but by her freshman year of high school she joined the school band as a percussionist.

It was during one of those band practices, when she was 15, that a classmate’s flute performance changed her course.

“It was an instant decision,” Storey says. “She had the most beautiful tone on her flute, and I thought, ‘I just have to learn to play that instrument.’ I remember it to this day.”

Before long, Storey was taking private lessons from a professional flautist who had just moved to Prince Edward Island. As her skills developed, the teacher encouraged Storey to pursue a degree in flute performance from the Royal Conservatory of Music. And while she had a desire to make music her profession, she didn’t believe she had enough talent to succeed, so she pursued a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and computer science at the same time.

Finishing her degree from the conservatory, a thousand miles from her hometown, took its own brand of creativity.

“When it was time to take my final exam, there was no local location for me to go to for an exam at that level, so I had to fly myself and my accompanist to Toronto,” Storey says. “I did some final rehearsing in a bathroom and then went up before the adjudicators.”

With a bachelor’s degree also in hand, followed by an MBA, Storey began working in Montreal for Canadian National Railway, where she met her husband, Gordon Rogers. She later earned a Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia.

Veda C. Storey takes time every morning for flute practice.

She and her family moved to Atlanta in 1996, and Storey took a position at Georgia State, where she’s now the Tull Professor in Computer Information Systems in the Robinson College and a professor of computer science.

“Georgia State had the largest department in the world in my area,” Storey says of the decision to come to what was then known as the College of Business Administration. “A lot of good things were happening, and it’s been great.”

In 2018, Storey received a hat trick of academic accolades, including Georgia State’s Instructional Innovation Award and the Peter C. Chen Award for outstanding contributions to the field of conceptual modeling. She also received an Association for Information Systems Fellow Award.

But for all of her professional accomplishments, music has remained a steady presence in Storey’s life.

“I still practice every day, first thing in the morning when no one is up,” she says. “I learned very early that if I practiced before everyone got up, I would get my practicing done and no one could take that away from me. Over the years, I have practiced in very odd places, including basements, bathrooms and closets so I don’t disturb anyone.”

As her family grew, Storey made sure each of her children found their way to the piano bench by age 3 or 4. She wanted them to have a firm foundation in music at an early age, having always felt she lagged behind her peers who began studying years before she did.

“Our children all had piano lessons and voice lessons,” Storey says, “and they all had a woodwind instrument as well as some other instruments that arrived in our house, like guitars and drums. They studied all the instruments. They didn’t just play them in band at school.

“To learn it right, I needed a teacher, so what I really tried to do for them was get them good teachers.”

Of the seven children, there is a set of triplets and a set of twins. Keenan and Devon are 27. Aidan, Brydan and Corin are 25. Leith is 22 years old, and Ivy Catherine, the only girl, is the youngest at 19. They each attended Chamblee Charter High School, and each has graduated from or is studying at a public university.

A pair of the triplets, Corin and Brydan, have what is referred to as perfect pitch — the ability to hear a musical note, discern what it is and replicate it. It is far more rare than relative pitch, which is being able to distinguish and reproduce a given note with the aid of a known reference note.

His gifted ear is a talent Corin has put to use earning degrees in composition and music business and in his work as a producer, audio engineer and composer.