The webspinna was a lot more difficult than imagined it was going to be. I am one who beat boxes and can loop noises to music like nobody's business so I thought that this would be a piece of cake. What surprised me though was the need to find only clips that related to my character and then to make sure they had the right volume to be played simultaneously one with another.
Josh and I wanted to choose a subject that would be very easy to represent and thus we chose the blatant enemies of light and dark. At the time it sounded like it was going to be a piece of cake but then once I started looking for sounds, all of the preconceived sounds in my mind ended up seeming like they would go better with dark then with light. I first began to look at figures of truth and wisdom from Gandalf, Yoda, and Dumbledore. They only had some lame quotes and I wanted my clips to each be clearly about doing good or making right choices rather than just having any phrase by the person and because it was said by that person of light, it was fine. Quickly, Morgan Freeman also popped into my mind and I remembered a song by B.O.B. that was a narration of Morgan Freeman in it in which he talks about the war between light and darkness and if it will ever be one. I was very excited for this epic piece of audible joy but then realized it could go with both of our topics so I talked with Josh and we said we would use it as our intro piece. He then shared a song by Fall Out Boy with me that spoke mostly of darkness and so he wanted to use it but then the chorus spoke of light. We talked and figured that we could play the different parts of the song one after another and I would be "fighting him with his own medicine." We thought we were pretty clever.
Now that we had a little direction of where to go with our clips, it was battle time. I found difficulty in adjusting the volume of YouTube videos while live and they would be too loud for my other sounds to be heard in the mix. That would have been nice to consider and practice beforehand but Josh and I were super busy and had no time to consult and practice before the show. However, with the few things we had already planned out (as explained above) we fashioned our performance to not always be in contrast with one another or and ambiguous but to have some structure like the introduction and the matching songs. We didn't want to be like the readings from DJ Spooky and be hard to follow and ambiguous. I feel this more organized and relevant approach is more like how a real battle would go down in real life. I don't think if someone came at you with a sword, you would fend him off with football (just an example of non-matching ambiguous battle techniques that we tried to avoid using).
All in all, I enjoyed the experience of the webspinna but wished there could have been more performance to match the hype of the event. Maybe if we could have pre-organized our sounds and then had a dance battle to our pre-made song, it would have been more engaging for the audience.
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