First drill for 2008...

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOD MORNING!!! This is my first drill for the season, but I have to apologize. There is NO sound. I used Camstasia Studio 4 to record my screen, and coded this as a Quicktime movie and then saved it to my computer. There is an option in CS4 that says "Do you want to record the sound that's coming from your computer?" I of course do, because when I animate drill using my Pyware 3D Java 3.1.1, I synch it up to .wav or .mp3 or MIDI files. For whatever reason, it didn't code the sound, even though during the processing period the software specifically stated it was "Compressing Audio Now". Rat bastard software. ANYWAY, just pretend you can hear music. And if you're "in the know" to current marching band music, this drill was written to John Meehan's "The Garden" opener, which is called "Anthill". Yeah--that would be same music I wrote for a certain band last year that took 2nd place in the state but fired me anyway.

Ahhhh...life of a drill designer. Whadda ya know, hanh? Anyway--I've come to realize (in all honesty--and no, I'm not mad!!!) that out of EVERYTHING that goes into the creation of a field show for either drum corps or marching band, the DRILL DESIGN is THE SINGLE MOST SUBJECTIVE ELEMENT. Bar none. You can have rifles spinning rifles up their noses, drummers with drum sticks embedded in their foreheads, and music written to sound like the Jordanian Army Band (which I saw perform many moons ago, and I believe I'm still traumatized by what I heard), and yet, the DRILL has to be "perfect". And PERFECT is defined about as differently as I've ever seen a word defined. Beauty, in the case of drill design, is DEFINITELY in the eye of the beholder. The drill designer's job is to figure out, sometimes through psychic intervention, what "beauty" means to the people that hire you.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HA!!!

Got ya. THAT is the secret. ANYWAY, you may not like what I wrote when you watch it, or you may think it's the best thing since sliced bread. What's important though--is that I as the "artist" or designer or whatever you want to call me (dot writer) likes it.

A lot.