bones

I wonder if you loaded the entire DCI catalog into Pandora, and liked your 5 best shows, what other shows the algorithm would recommend for you?

For the OP: what are the top 5 *shows* (not just songs like Canyon) in history that meet your criteria for goodness? Curious to hear your opinion on this.

1) Mandatory mello sustains in the last 30 seconds of every show. 2) Eliminate “electronic goo”. 3) Require staffs to do more background tv/video interviews on the show design, intent, inspiration and some inside baseball anecdotes about the show’s creation. Ref. Dan Potter’s Field Pass interview with Dean Westman re: Tilt. Great stuff.

Crossmen guard 11th tonite vs 6th and 7th in prelims and semis. Really??? Fubar.

Check out the DCI Field Pass Podcasts from 2014. Dan Potter interviews Michael Cesario on one of the episodes about the judging change. Cesario comments extensively about the changes in the GE judging captions. Basically, one GE judge is more visual focused and the other is more music focused, but the visual guy can comment on, and give points for, a musical effect that they found to be great, and vice versa. They can also give combined credit (viz and music) if there's a well designed effect where both viz and music are used in a holistic way for fantastic effect (like oh, I don't know, the whole Cavaliers 007 show maybe!). If you don't listen to them, the Field Pass podcasts are actually quite good. Dan does a good job covering a lot of interesting topics (judging, move-ins, specific corps shows, etc). Especially in the early season, this is a great way to feed your fix for drum corps info. The interview w/ Dean Westman last year about the Tilt show was one of my favorites. Check it out. Zildjian sponsors the podcasts (as you'll hear at the top of each episode). Enjoy the rest of the season. It's going to be fun to see where all this pans out in the end, ranking-wise.

(double post)

Could be: 1) One judge is on the field and one's in the press box. You can get very different reads. The trend has been to get the judges off the field. I'm not sure where they were judging from for this show. 2) A judge might be "sending a message" to "LISTEN TO MY TAPE!" and / or "COME SEE ME AT CRITIQUE". #### straight that funky numbers like this will get the staff's attention. 3) Maybe the judge had some indigestion during the low-scored corps show. :) Overall, I like this kind of "wacky" scoring mid-season. Too often, I've seen "slotting" where scoring rank is the same across the board across all judges (BD is 1st across all captions, Cadets is 2nd, etc.). For each corps, we know there are strengths and weaknesses. And for each corps, we know the "any given Sunday" argument can apply to a section of the corps or to the entire corps. That should show up on the sheets. My $0.02.

Congrats to Bluecoats on a fantastic, breathtaking, and ground-breaking show. This is one for the ages, that we will talk about 10, 20, 30 years from now. The concept, execution, finals-week surge, crowd-reaction & support are all amazing. So glad I had the opportunity to see it live during the season. Congratulations to all the performers, staff, volunteers, and others who made it all happen. You have vaulted to another level, and we are all the better for it. Revel in your success and achievement. I'm going to go back and watch it again... Also, if you haven't seen it yet, have a listen to the July 2nd DCI Field Pass where Bluecoats Program Coordinator Dean Westman discusses the show in detail, including the famous pitch-bend. It's a fantastic interview! Link: http://www.dci.org/news/view.cfm?news_id=2a43d7cb-d20a-4e11-b774-0dbc50f3f417 THANK YOU for bringing something truly special to the field this year & creating a gem we can enjoy for years to come. Safe travels home to all. BLOOO!

The July 2nd DCI Field Pass (the DCI podcast ) has an interview with the Bluecoats Program Cordinator. He explains some of the key aspects of the show, and includes a detailed explanation of the pitch bend effect. It's the Coats hornline (recorded) that "is" the sound you are hearing on the bend. Regardless of your take on electronics, it is a great effect in a fantastic show. They carry the theme throughout , with some clever and novel parts to the show. I was on my feet at the West Chester show, that's for sure. One of the best performances on the field in decades. The members of the Bluecoats and the other top corps are performing at ridiculously high levels. The entertainment value is strong (after many years of complaints about inaccessible shows) and it's great to see DCI corps fielding this level of excellence year in and year out. I'm not a huge fan of all the changes (the bass "goo" bring my least favorite), but I think most would agree that the top 8 have phenomenal performances , the the next 7-9 are pretty entertaining as well.

Well, if it weren't for that 1.0 spread to Blue Stars in colorguard last night, Xmen would have been 12th. Crossmen beat Blue Stars in CG at Allentown by 0.3 (heck they also beat Madison's guard at Allentown last Saturday night, but were 0.5 BEHIND Madison in CG last night). I saw the theater performance last nite and the Crossmen guard looked pretty good...not the bomb that the scores would lead you to believe. Overall, Xmen were 12th in both GE captions last night (one GE judge had them in 11th, all GE judges had them 1 placement above Blue Stars). Xmen also ahead of BlueStars in Visual Analysis, Brass & Music Analysis. Behind Blue Stars in Visual Proficiency (0.4 point spread), CG (1.0 point spread) and Percussion (0.6 point spread). As a member of the '89 corps (when we returned to finals), I remember the hype of today (the day of Semi's). The energy level, excitement and anticipation at rehearsal that day was awesome. We were rehearsing at Plattsburg (home of the "Plattsburgers") and blew it away at Arrowhead that night. What I wouldn't give to be at rehearsal today, to be on the bus on the way to the stadium, to be in the tunnel, to watch them rip it up tonight! Go Bones!!!!

Here’s an idea: Try a multi-window Cinecast viewing experience with some/all corps next year. As you watch in the theater, the screen would be broken into 4 sections. You’d have a main screen that took up most of the real estate, with three small boxes across the bottom of the screen. All run in sync, but all show different views of the performance. (Kind of like that movie Timecode.) The main screen would show multi-cam views, but 80-90% of the shots would be high-cam (full-corps) view or mid-level (ensemble) camera views. The three small boxes at bottom would showcase: (1) 100% percussion ensemble, (2) 100% color guard ensemble, and (3) 100% soloists/performer close-ups/DM/etc. This way, during a drum solo, you could watch the drill in the larger screen while watching the battery/pit in the smaller box at the bottom. You could watch Carmen/GeneKelly/Hollyx4 to your heart’s content in the soloist/performer close-up window while catching the rest of the corps on the bigger view. You wouldn’t lose much of the experience on the larger part of the screen because most of the hi-cam views have large swaths of the front & back stands at the top and bottom of the picture anyway. So there’s no lost picture on the high-cam shots as long as the camera person lines up the shot correctly . Mid-level shots would lose some, but not much, of the picture. The director would need co-directors who are responsible for calling camera shots for each of the smaller views. And of course, you’d need real time processing to mix these together before pumping them out to the satellite (but that's been done in previous broadcasts, albeit w/ only 1 soloist window). Total cameras required probably wouldn’t be anything in excess of what they have now because the DVD has percussion-only and colorguard-only camera views already. The screen might end up being a bit too frenetic with all the camera views. But if you had a problem, you could slouch down in your seat so the head of the person in front of you blocked the bottom camera views. :) Thoughts?