Battle Three - Wrap Up
Tonight's Laptop Battle was amazing. Congrats to our champ Minky Boodle (who performed last time as Pixivixen). Atlanta's only female contestant showed the boys how it's done!
Thanks once again for a great battle in Atlanta. As always, Lenny's was the perfect place and we got great support from Spencer, Bean, and all of the staff.
Laptop Battle 3 saw the widest range of performance styles yet. From Poodleface's video commentary theatrics to Graham Coleman's real-time code writing to Minky Boodle's genre defying dance attack, this battle event brought out some amazing talent and demonstrated the potential for creativity and experimentation with the format. pH went almost entirely beatless and moved on to the finals, while Threv remixed the DuckTales theme song for one of the night's most crowd-pleasing moments.
The field was stacked almost entirely with new faces, which was a joy to see, and the crowd had something different to look forward to in each round. While our rearranged format left a few people scratching their heads, it felt like the round robin and elmination rounds worked to give our seven contestants a fair shot at proving their skills.
The group round was tight, but emerging from their groups were Threv, Minky Boodle, pH, and Graham Coleman--a group that couldn't possibly have represented any more divergent styles and approaches to the battle. These four will advance to the Atlanta Laptop Battle Finals this fall to face off against Merkatroid, Tricil, Mini Destroy, and Recompas. The finals should be interesting, as these eight contestants are all doing something pretty different (some of them radically different), and they are all using a variety of software and compositional techniques.
Thanks once again to everyone who competed and to everyone who showed up to root the contestants on. We'll be back in the fall for the finals. Until then...
Thanks once again for a great battle in Atlanta. As always, Lenny's was the perfect place and we got great support from Spencer, Bean, and all of the staff.
Laptop Battle 3 saw the widest range of performance styles yet. From Poodleface's video commentary theatrics to Graham Coleman's real-time code writing to Minky Boodle's genre defying dance attack, this battle event brought out some amazing talent and demonstrated the potential for creativity and experimentation with the format. pH went almost entirely beatless and moved on to the finals, while Threv remixed the DuckTales theme song for one of the night's most crowd-pleasing moments.
The field was stacked almost entirely with new faces, which was a joy to see, and the crowd had something different to look forward to in each round. While our rearranged format left a few people scratching their heads, it felt like the round robin and elmination rounds worked to give our seven contestants a fair shot at proving their skills.
The group round was tight, but emerging from their groups were Threv, Minky Boodle, pH, and Graham Coleman--a group that couldn't possibly have represented any more divergent styles and approaches to the battle. These four will advance to the Atlanta Laptop Battle Finals this fall to face off against Merkatroid, Tricil, Mini Destroy, and Recompas. The finals should be interesting, as these eight contestants are all doing something pretty different (some of them radically different), and they are all using a variety of software and compositional techniques.
Thanks once again to everyone who competed and to everyone who showed up to root the contestants on. We'll be back in the fall for the finals. Until then...
4 Comments:
Hey -- I gotta say LB3 was a lot of fun, and thanks for putting it on. The new format was kinda mysterious, though; was it me, or were winners not always announced? Sometimes I had to infer by just watching for who ended up being onstage again.
I also really wanted to know what the judging criteria were. I know that divulging that puts more pressure on the (presumably unpaid volunteer) judges, but even just some vague idea of what someone did right/wrong would be helpful. I'm not alone in thinking Threv and Poodleface to be by far the most entertaining performers there, and we didn't see either one of them in the finals... and no one seems to know why. (Although Threv was entered twice, so it really wouldn't have seemed fair if he'd won anyway...)
As for Poodleface, someone said something in the parking lot about playback vs. performance, re: manipulation of the media. They were implying that he should have set it up to use the laptop as some kind of instrument or at least effects box to be manipulated live onstage, like some of the other folks did, instead of just hitting play and then dancing and stuff. I don't know if that has anything to do with how the judges were deciding, but if it does than this confuses me a bit.
Nowhere on the webpage, and certainly at no time during the event, did anyone specify that the laptop must be manipulated during performance, or even that it would be better somehow to do so. I could get up there knowing nothing about any music software, hit play on some composition I downloaded from Japan, and just pretend to be changing something live. Or, just be altering one lame little filter that EQ's some static. And as far as performance is concerned, A) who's going to be the wiser? The crowd can't usually tell WTF you're doing. And, B) how does this really make it a "better performance" anyway? If I could tell for sure that you couldn't have prepared something ahead of time (say you use a sample taken of one of the other performers, and use it when you get up there) -- that would be pretty inspired, but you still could have done it while seated and not on stage. What's the difference, as long as the computer operator is entertaining and not just sitting there staring at his screen?
As soon as you put down your traditional instrument and pick up a laptop instead, you have decided that you are not going to live by limitations that, say, hold one player to one instrument -- you're going to mix a whole lot of instruments together ahead of time and play them all at once with this thing. You're always doing a whole lot of *something* ahead of time (or piggybacking the efforts of others who did, by sampling their recordings), and there's no clear threshold as to how much is okay to do ahead of time and how much needs to be done live. All that's clear is that the crowd expectations need to be met, and people entertained. And if I see a laptop on a stage my expectations are, "If something doesn't leap out at me as definitely having been done live, then it probably wasn't." But that doesn't mean the show can't be entertaining.
So basically, if something other than "entertain the crowd" and "use one laptop to do it" is going to be a criterion for winning, that should probably be expressed to the participants ahead of time. I'm just saying.
- Ben (pynk at gtf.org)
Thanks for the feedback. Let me try to address these items one at a time.
1. Yes, the winners were always announced. In this respect, to answer your question, it was just you. We announced the winner of each battle and scored them on the bracket. While the winner announcements may not have stopped the world, we did make sure to announce them.
Trying to keep the event moving quickly means that people are constantly setting up and tearing down and if some of the announcements got lost in that shuffle, that's something we should work on, but they were all clearly made.
2. Threv playing twice While this was not the optimal arrangement, the choices I saw given a 7-member bracket when I was expecting 10 or 12 (even numbers make it easier, but at least 8 is essential) were: A)Give someone a bye in the first round, B)let a non-competing person take the 8th slot and not count his/her victory if there was one, C)restructure the whole event to a different system of chosing who plays who, D)let someone play twice. We tried a combination of those last two, by modifying the bracket structure to the groups/brackets and by making Threv play twice. This was by my estimation a hinderance more than a help to Threv. Having more chances to win is also a way of spreading out your best material. Frankly if I were him, I would have put all my best songs in one group and tanked the other on purpose, but he valiantly gave it all he had both ways and it worked out for him. Unfortunately by the final, his best material was spent, but he moves on regardless.
Threv had this opportunity/misfortune because he's been with the event the longest of any of the competitors from the other night. It's certainly not IDEAL, but it's the best way we could think of to handle a less than ideal situation on the spot.
3. Performance vs. Playback There is nothing in the rules to inhibit playback vs. live manipulation of the material. In each battle so far, we've had at least one person who was essentially hitting play on an mp3 or in this case a video and that doesn't take away from their creativity score or their crowd response score, it only affects the technical skill score. In order to judge technical skill, we have to see that the contestant is doing something, er, technical. I'm sure that Poodleface spent time making those great videos, just as everyone who put time into their compositions also spent time before the event preparing them.
For a simple example, let's say that contestant A spends 5 hours editing together a 2 minute song, then shows up, hits play on the computer, and dances to the composition. Let's say contestant B spends the same five hours on a 2 minute composition, but then uses the 2 minutes onstage to perform it in some way. In my mind, that's clearly a better demonstration of the skill because I can see what you are doing (and yes, we all looked at software and screens and what people were actually doing) than contestant A. It doesn't take anything away from what contestant A did, and in fact A's composition might be better and it might be far more entertaining, but for the category of technical skill, they would get a lower score.
At the heart of your question is the notion of 'what is a laptop performance' and I am of the mind that it is whatever you make of it. It CAN be hitting play, it CAN be playing every note live, it CAN be writing code in real time, and it CAN be setting your laptop on fire and singing a Bob Marley tune... any of those are legitimate ways to perform. However, how does all of that fit together is the real question, and for any individual performance, that's the question we have to answer.
It's not fair for me to go into deep detail about what we didn't like about a particular performer's piece at the battle in public, I can only speak generally. Suffice it to say that as the judges, we felt that we considered the performances and made our decisions. Anyone who competed who'd like to know what we did or didn't like or would like some constructive feedback should email me, and I'd be happy to share. I don't want to argue with people, but I'm happy to share why we made the decisions we did which were certainly not arbitrary.
What seems to be the issue here is not entirely that people didn't have enough information or that the parameters weren't clear enough, but that the judging was subjective. The judging is subjective because audiences are subjective. There are no strict guidelines you have to follow to win the laptop battle, but you have to excell in three areas and in our judgement the people who won did the best at that.
One other thing to remember is that this is a relatively new art form, this is a new type of experience to almost everyone involved, and there are no right answers necessarily. We are trying to make an event that's fun and that brings people together in a healthy spirit of competition and allows people to perform for an audience that they wouldn't otherwise have. There is an inherent risk of failure there, which is why so many people sign up and then chicken out on these things. We want the events to continue to be fun, to inspire people to try new things, and to expose new people to the world of performing with a laptop--all of our contestants did those things on Monday and I'm proud of all of them for that. Unfortunately, becuase it IS structured as a contest, someone has to win and someone has to lose. We'll never get everyone to agree about those decisions, so the best we can try for is an honest attempt to make it fun and fair, which is what I think we did.
Thanks again for your feedback. I really do appreciate if you've seen previous battles you will know that we have incorporated feedback each time to make the next event better.
I will not vouch for my listening skills; I'll take your word for it that the winners were announced. :)
Okay, and actually it sounds like you've answered one question that a lot of us have, which is "what are the judging criteria"? You named three broad areas: composition, technical ability, and entertainment value / crowd response. Would it be fair to say that these are three equally-weighted areas that contestants are judged on? If so, then just say that on the site and at the event. I think that's a lot better than nothing, even if each one of those areas is still pretty broad and open to a lot of subjectivity. That would give potential new contestants SOME idea of what they're shooting for.
I see in the original post that it says, "This is a contest to put pure composition, sound design, and performance to the test." It almost sounds like you came out and said it there, but may I humbly recommend a slight rewrite (and a more prominent link on the top-level page to an updated version of those guidelines) that puts the above statement under the header "How do you know who wins?" instead of "What can I use in the Battle?", thus making it far more clear that those are judging criteria. And may I recommend "technical ability" instead of "sound design", since "composition" and "sound design" mean almost exactly the same thing to me.
And if people get an advantage for manipulating media in real time, please come right out and say that too. It really is a big difference.
Ben
For the sake of potential new contestants (ie, the audience), I agree, we could do a better job of outlining the guidelines. For the contestants, I explained the judging and mentioned these three broad categories to them before the event.
Also, I answered several questions from potential contestants before this last battle, and I'm always willing to do that, so I'd recommend that if something is unclear before the event (for those competing), that they need to ask me to clarify it. Out of three battles, this is the first time I've heard that the criteria for selecting the winners was unclear--which is not to say that it was clear, just to say it's much easier to correct a problem or perceived problem like this beforehand than it is after.
Thanks again for your feedback.
The national battle is, (for what it's worth), more vague and limited than ours!
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