Designers' Toolbox - Set Pieces

[Channel3]

This is right about the time when designers finalize their show's set pieces.

In old time drum corps in the 70's and early 80's, designers created standalone visual set pieces to peak viewer interest. Many were just signature drill moves that could be repeated annually, and weren't thematically tied to the music:

• Phantom's Rockford File
• Madison's rotating company front
• Cadet's Z-Pull
• 27th's wheel
• Troopers' sunburst

Other early set pieces were cleverly tied to the music's theme:

• SCV Bottle Dance
• Cavaliers' Softly step-over move (the theme of reclining as if dying repeated in this tune twice-- the stepover and the ending where the horns lay on their backs)
• Guardsmen's Maypole

Even today in the new millennium, corps have standalone signature set pieces related to their logo or corps tradition:

• Carolina's Crown formation
• Boston Crusaders' strains of Conquest

As drum corps has become more sophisticated, designers are creating unforgettable set pieces that do double duty-- they provide viewer interest and support the show's dramatic action at the same time. Many of today's set pieces rely on theatrical accouterment rather than on drill moves or technical prowess. The most powerful set pieces display technical skill, support the dramatic action of the show itself, and create lasting brand impression:

· Crown - Inferno - Hornline wrapped in a river of blood

· BD - Felliniesque - Circus like 30-foot rifle toss

· Cavaliers - Machine - Cyborg robots come off the assembly line and play

· Blue Stars - Side Show - Conjoined twins flag work

· Cadets - Angels and Demons - Two opposing corps combine into one seamless unit at the end.

Often screenwriters create a series of set pieces on a single theme and string them together to form a story or through-line for a film. Drum corps shows can be created the same way, providing a loose understructure. For example, the Blue Devils' Felliniesque and Ink used character-based vignette set pieces loosely strung together around a strong central theme, and then gathered the characters together, en masse, at the end. Their ending relied on a rerprise tableau of characters, which created a satisfying resolution and completion to the show's action.

Set pieces form a pattern in the drum corps viewer’s mind. The set pieces link together based on the theme to strengthen the underlying dramatic action. The audience imagines what comes next, based on what’s come before. These set pieces help set the audience’s expectations about how the show’s dramatic action progresses, heightens and resolves. Strong set pieces create tradition, and create iconic emblems in the viewer's mind about the corp's brand. Without set pieces, the audience is lost and blindly searches for the underlying pattern of action, which eventually lowers the audience's investment in the final moments, and lowers the stakes of the show, overall.

This article on the history of film set pieces may help spark some ideas in drum corps designers' minds about creating visual set pieces that do everything at once:

• display technical skill
• support the dramatic action of the show
• and create a lasting brand impression.

http://www.scriptmag.com/features/columns/script-secrets-set-pieces

Edited May 13, 2016 by Channel3

[Tim K]

Other classic set pieces could include 27th's wheel, Troopers' sunburst, and North Star creating a star with a "n" in the middle.

Two set pieces we see today could include Carolina Crown including its crown symbol in the show, usually at the end, and musically, BAC planning strains of "Conquest" at some point in the show.

[N.E. Brigand]

Nice post.

(I'm not sure whether a short musical quote like Boston's "Conquest" really counts as a set piece, but I'll note that over in DCA, one equivalent would be Connecticut Hurricanes quoting "The Magnificent Seven".)

[Stu]

Using movie design structure, as opposed to say stage musical structure, as the driving force in DCI design is the problem I find within the current DCI design process; and here is why: In a stage production music and visual are co-equal; neither is more important than the other and both musical sets as well as visual sets are 'equally viable'. However, within the structure of a movie the music soundtrack on screen is intended to be incidental and supplementary; it is there to lie beneath and merely support the more important aspects of visual and dialogue. And while musical motifs are constructed by the composers in movie pre-production, within the final movies themselves the music certainly has no coherent musical phrasing; it is disjunctive when heard on screen because the phrasing is driven solely by the visual and dialogue time line cues. In fact, many of the best movies are those where the memorable music ‘sets’ are just short bursts of emotion, or the music is not even supposed to be remembered at all when you are walking out of the theater!! Talk to the major movie music composers; they will inform you that the music on their CD soundtracks typically have to go through some major re-orchestrations to even make the music on the CD comprehensible to the listener. Thus when DCI design is considered like a movie as opposed to a stage production we end up with the disjunctive musical treatments along with the driving visual components currently produced in many DCI show concepts.

[Channel3]

Using movie design structure, as opposed to say stage musical structure, as the driving force in DCI design is the problem I find within the current DCI design process;

Music first or visual first, I'll take either one at this point! The problem is that many shows don't have enough set pieces. Audiences are seeing extended periods of busy, frantically morphing drill sets with gratuitous movement, signifying nothing. It looks like an almost comedic, desperate, ant-hill during a rainstorm, thrashing to and fro, choreographed as a test of nationality by Kim Jung Il.

Edited May 15, 2016 by Channel3

[tesmusic]

Music first or visual first, I'll take either one at this point! The problem is that many shows don't have enough set pieces. Audiences are seeing extended periods of busy, frantically morphing drill sets with gratuitous movement, signifying nothing. It looks like an almost a comedic, desperate, ant-hill during a rainstorm, thrashing to and fro, choreographed as a test of nationality by Kim Jung Il.

Did you just equate DCI visual design to North Korea? That's just absurd. Your point was going well until you made yourself irrelevant with that ####.

[Daave]

A twofer. The post and the corollary to Godwin's Law.

Drink

[Cappybara]

Did you just equate DCI visual design to North Korea? That's just absurd. Your point was going well until you made yourself irrelevant with that ####.

Oh come on you know he didn't mean that literally. He's just trying to make his description stand out and it works

[Channel3]

Did you just equate DCI visual design to North Korea? That's just absurd. Your point was going well until you made yourself irrelevant with that ####.

Looks like this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G06VGB5-4A&t=2m5s

[Stu]

Looks like this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G06VGB5-4A&t=2m5s

I just watched a lot of these NK videos, especially the one where Madeleine Albright visits the stadium. What I found intriguing was that the people in entire stadium audience sat quiet like stiff boards, burst into applause ‘only on cue from the supreme leader’, and then sat quiet again stiff as boards. Yep, just like George Hopkins and the audiences at DCI shows alright!!!!