Fantasme Chorus Battle: Round 1

Oh wow, this was something I wrote up in the middle of the battle, but never got around to posting this at the end. 😅 Since I recently came back to this blog and found this, I thought I'll post this anyways. Especially since now I've got some more chorus battle experiences, so this will help show my evolution! Anyways, without further ado, here's what I wrote.

I entered into my first chorus battle this year (November of 2017), and my friends and I decided to go with Fantasme Chorus Battle, mostly because it seemed like a nice, relaxed, chorus battle. Which is great for noobs like us. Our group originally consisted of three female vocalists, three male vocalists, a lyricist, artist, animator, and tuner. 

It took us nearly a week to decide on our song. We talked about everything, from Muteki no Soldier, to Universe, to History Maker. We finally decided on This Game the theme from No Game No Life.

A few of us then began the task of translyric-ing it and scripting it. Honestly, it wasn’t too hard to do. But then, vocal guides reared its head.

One of the girls volunteered to do the vocal guides, but, we ended up overthrowing what she had done in favor of the vocal guides that the girl who did the translyric-ing made. I volunteered to work on harmony guides. Which was a mistake, because I know nothing about making harmony guides. I literally looked at a piano transcription and translated that into notes which I then sung. It was bad. 

We set a deadline for the vocals and lo-and-behold, one of our vocalists dropped. It sent a good half of us into a panic. Me in particular. I was pretty much screaming all night long. But wait, good news! One of our friends decided to step in and replace the lost vocalist. So we didn’t have to rescript everything, which is fantastic. Our voices are a bit uneven now, since now it’s 4 girls and 2 guys, but it’s fine. 

Vocals came in and I did a rough mix. That was when I realized, my harmony guides were way too slow. There was no way we could fix the recordings with mixing, so, they needed to be re-recorded. Good thing was that only half of us had recorded our lines, so it’s not like there was a complete overhaul. We decided that night that we weren’t going to do harmonies. The difference in octaves between the singers would be enough. New vocal guides came out and we were good to go. This was also around the time when the organizers of Fantasme Chorus Battle extended the deadline a week. 

Then…we had another drop. By this point I was too mentally exhausted to even scream about having 1/3 of our vocalists leaving, so I just asked our staff members if they were willing to sing. They were, and it was great. However, now we were even more lopsided than before. Now it was 5 girls and 1 guy. However, we decided that two of the girls could drop down an octave during the chorus parts and it’ll even out. Spoiler alert, it did, and it sounds pretty great if I do say so myself.

A few days later and we got a preview of the art for the video, and at least half of the group was squealing and gushing over how awesome it was. We had decided to go with a chess theme. With everyone taking a different piece (queen, king, knight, rook, bishop, and pawn) and there was some discussion about weapons for these characters as well (scepter, sword, scythe, staff, book, shield). 

A week later and 5 of our vocalists had vocals turned in. (this was the due date we set, so that’s good) I put together a rough mix and noted some places where we needed some re-recordings, but overall, it was coming along really well. All I had to do was wait for the last person to turn in their vocals and I could send it off to our tuner.

Once we got all of our vocals in, I timed it and sent if off to our tuner who, well, tuned. Unfortunately, by that point we were cutting it very close on time and she didn't have that much time to tune or do any effects or EQing. So our final mix was just timed and tuned.

Unfortunately, due to improper leadership and all around messiness, our final mix was finished on the day that Round 1 ended. Our animator started to render and we all panicked when we realized it was going to take longer than a day to render it. By the time it was done rendering, the grace period for Round 1 would've been long over. So, that's when I stepped in. We were out of options so I threw together a quick video. I don't have After Effects, and the program that I use is intended to splice videos together. This hurt us in the animation category because the camera needed to move, and couldn't be in a static position. Which, at the time, I had no idea how to do. 

Overall, when we got our judging back, we did really bad. A lot of us were very discouraged by this. I had a lot of finals coming up so I proposed to sit out Round 2 in order to get back our energy and motivation, then to come in Round 3 with renewed energy. Unfortunately, the staff members weren't too pleased with that. So they left. The team was in shambles and motivation was lost so we decided to let the team split apart. It was no use to kick the dead horse.