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2019 Phantom Regiment


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35 minutes ago, Glenn426 said:

There are many successful designers in the activity.. One only need to look at the corps climbing the ranks, Or a look at the successful BOA Shows the past couple of years and who the designers are behind them...  A look at the WGI ranks also wouldn't hurt as they would likely have designers that would pay attention to the trends and know how to implement them.. 

BOA and WGI is not the solution.  They are two completely different activities / dynamics / techniques compared to DCI. A strong staff must have its core in Drum Corps.   

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1 minute ago, Land_Surfer said:

BOA and WGI is not the solution.  They are two completely different activities / dynamics / techniques compared to DCI. A strong staff must have its core in Drum Corps.   

The three activities are so intertwined it is almost impossible to find a designer who only works in DCI. The best Guard designers have groups that they work with in WGI. The best Drum arranger/ caption heads work in WGI. Almost all DCI Drill Writers write for the top BOA Groups.. The young designers hone their skills in BOA and WGI and the best make their way to DCI.

To Say that you want someone who doesnt do work in BOA/WGI would leave with someone who is designing groups that are not being exposed to the same exact judges that judge their work in DCI.

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1 hour ago, EricS said:

The problem precedes your point.  The problem is why did PR loose Rennick and Shaw to begin with.  And I will also once again, not the reason they left, but money talks.  

PR seems to have a lot of very loyal and avid fans.  It's time to mount a major campaign to raise money for top notch staff.  And not just for one year, a fund that perpetuates itself.  Maybe PR needs to spend the money, go outside it's own staff and hire a firm who knows how to generate serious cash.  

Exactly. Lack of creative expression. Too much constriction from the top.

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19 minutes ago, 2muchcoffeeman said:

Let's run the numbers on this idea. Very round numbers.

Tour expenses typically consume half or more of a corps' annual budget. Admin/design/instruction staff will consume 25-33% of it. 

In a $1M annual budget, that amounts to, at the lower end, about $250K annually for the design & instructional braintrust.

How much money do you need in a pile to throw off $250K annually?

Assuming a 6 percent rate of return, you need an endowment of $4.16M.
Assuming an 8 percent return, you need $3.125M

That's low end -- a $1M budget and 25% to staff. If your budget is bigger and/or the design team is top-drawer, you can expect to spend what, $500K per year? I don't know. But if that's accurate, you'll need $8.33M in the bank at 6 percent to throw of $500K each year.

How many Phantom alums out there? No idea, but how about this:

150 members per year, 50 years, 2/3 retention rate. That comes to roughly 2,551 members over the past half a century; the precise number that would move in a direction inverse to the average number of years each member marched PR (higher average years in the corps means fewer alums, and vice-versa). Maybe 10 percent have died. That's 2,296 alums. YMMV

At the low end, to amass $4.16M, you need to collect $1,812 from each alum (hey! 1812 could be a good number on which to hang a campaign). At the high end, to put together a $8.33M pot, you need $3,628 from each and every living alumnus.

Doable? I suppose. In every population, there are going to be a handful of large-dollar donors who carry 80% of the weight. Every capital campaign ever conducted works from that assumption. If you can find a dozen people to write $500K checks, you're practically home free.

But even if you could pull that off, you'll have to ask whether you've turned Phantom Regiment into a vanity project for alums.

I believe they are just starting to work on something like this, but alumni/leadership relations has not been good until five or so years ago. BD, SCV, Cavies all have fantastic alumni organizations that fully support the home team. PR is just starting to build this, ableit slowly. A few decades late and a dollar short unfortunately. 

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1 hour ago, DFA1970 said:

Yeah maybe they need a new program coordinator but some of you guys seem to think they are just available right off the market. Phantom lost two great designers to SCV..Rennick and Shaw. Those are two huge people to fill. So it's not an easy fix for any corp. That's like if BD lost Chandler, Scott Johnson and Todd Ryan. Do you think they would be the same if they lost these guys? 

Rennick left nearly a decade ago, and Shaw was right after.  That's an *eon* in this activity.

In terms of staff tumult, the Cavaliers went through HUGE shifts in the late 2000s into the 2010s and still never dropped out of the mid-top-12, and now they're back in the Top 5 dogfight pretty consistently.

Crown and Cadets have dealt with similar exoduses, but managed to mitigate the damage, so to speak.

This problem is not unique to Phantom, but only Madison has had as hard a time recovering as Phantom has.  These are not insurmountable obstacles, but one has to start asking about the decision making process at some point.

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31 minutes ago, Land_Surfer said:

BOA and WGI is not the solution.  They are two completely different activities / dynamics / techniques compared to DCI. A strong staff must have its core in Drum Corps.   

... that's very close to the stupidest thing I've ever read in here and I've been here for over a decade. 

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I haven’t seen the show yet (beyond the Concert in the Park footage) but, generally speaking, whenever you’re creating something— art, literature, whatever—you have to divest yourself from emotions and evaluate it as objectively as possible. Be prepared “to kill your darlings.” No matter how proud of or attached to an idea you may be, or how much time you’ve spent on it, you have to step back and do whatever needs to be done. Which is not easy, but necessary. 

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1 hour ago, hostrauser said:

You're telling me Phantom can't draw in a better staff than The Academy or the Mandarins? Seriously?

At the moment, yes.  And yes.  (Well, no, because it was not me saying that, but... )

The people running things at Academy and Mandarins are good people, and they are in it for the right reasons.  They have good ideas, and they have built good teams.  And they have worked at it very hard for a long time.  Why would you think these two corps could/should not compete at an equal/higher level than PR? 

Quote

My point is: I can't remember the last time a corps bottomed out this hard due to staff changes. Scouts 20 years ago? Other corps GET IT DONE. The Regiment organization is not getting it done, and they need major changes, from the BOD on down.

Fire the admin/BOD!  Keep at it - you might match Madison Scouts for angst after all.

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4 hours ago, Glenn426 said:

Phantom is a good case study of why you need an experienced designer at the helm to make all of the ideas that the arrangers and drill Writers have work together..

To pause and say what will marching around aimlessly do for the overall effect of the show, What good does playing a thousand notes during a Low Brass & Quad Soli do if it doesn't convey an emotional feeling, What in the world does any of this have to do with Joan?

A lot of these things should have been caught by a good Editorial designer. They would have said, Where is our focus, what are trying to convey, And what does it contribute to Joan.

At this point, they would have to re-write a couple of sections both in music and drill. They could stand for a couple of Breathing moments in the opener. Some arrival Points, where the show can breathe and the audience can appreciate how fast the opener is. Otherwise it feels like a run-on sentence.

And Their Transitions are just sloppy,  there is no structure to it, A Simple layering of responsibility to the scatter would focus the chaos. I would also consider dropping some of the tempos down 10 beats... in all of the fast sections so that the corps can sound and feel a little more mature.. 

It is possible to salvage this show but the designers are going to have to be smart to realize that they have perhaps over designed this show and that its time to bust out the editing pen.

And absolutely non of this is a slight on the performers, you can clearly see and hear that they have talent.

Pulling for you Phantom.. 

This right here.

I said in a post yesterday some of the same basic things. If something doesn't add to the design then it's just a distraction. Right now, there are a lot of distractions in this show. A slow moving opener with no direction and a drum line ramming notes to the backfield makes no sense. It adds nothing. The "I am joan" yell.....same thing. What is it adding? You just hit a big formation and haven't played a note....we already KNOW you're getting ready to try to melt our faces. 

I like certain sets like at around 4:30 and then the last 2 minutes of the show. The rest seems disjointed. The ballad is too spread out for me. Again, I was distracted with the "why are we spread from the 20 to the 20?" Too much to focus on the small brass ensemble guard work. The props sitting at the backfield doing nothing just bugs me. If you're going to have vertical staging then let's use it. 

The show has potential and I'm not going to doom it. But it needs some real guidance and a willingness to accept the feedback that the GE scores are showing.

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