Do you remember that competition I was telling you about? The Radio/Audio Production competition!? Well, Shae and I are now State Champs!! AND we get to travel to the National Competition in June!!! I AM SO EXCITED!!!!
We'd been practicing almost non-stop for the competition for about a week, staying up really late to finish our projects, and I was getting basically no sleep by the time I compounded practicing with attempting to study and stay on top of things for all of my other classes. To be honest, I was so happy to just have the whole thing over so that I could remove a level of stress from my life.
Our Professor (who has totally gone out of his way to help and to be there for us, and is truly an awesome guy) had been told by the Director of the State Competition that the competition would consist of a written test taken entirely from The Sound Effects Bible by Ric Viers (the apparent pioneer of Digital Sound Effects in Hollywood), and then the production of a 5 to 10 minute mini-documentary on a subject matter that we would find out at the competition.
In an effort to be well prepared (which any idiot would do I think) we began the process of reading this book cover to cover as well as continually practicing the production of mini-docs (which was no small feat by the way). All would have been fine except that THE DAY BEFORE the competition the State Director contacts our Professor and informs him that the format of the competition has changed a little and that we will now be producing a 60 second PSA (public service announcement) about the Skills USA organization itself.. That is a significant change of gears! My initial reaction? Ugh. What a waste of time. (I'm slowly admitting to myself that I'm somewhat of a pessimist.)
Anyway, in order to be in Salt Lake in time for the competition, we had to leave home/collegetown by 7 am. (By the way, have I mentioned that I am so totally NOT a morning person? At all?) Ugh again. The competition started almost as soon as we arrived, and started out fairly well. I pretty much sped through the exam portion which was a relief, and then wasted no time developing an outline that I wanted our production to follow. We were the first team to finish the test, and the first team to go out to other competition areas to begin gathering audio. That also put me in better spirits. :) The theme that I wanted our PSA to portray was one in which there would be a general statement like "Skills USA is"... and then a whole bunch of different people giving one to two word "clips". (I had an even better idea in the middle of editing in which we would get many people saying "My name is (insert name here) and I am Skills USA", but by that point it was way too late to go out and gather new audio.) We were running out of time, and I absolutely refused to turn it in late and receive a penalty, so I was starting to get a little irritated, but I got it all edited and compiled and we were like 10 seconds over, which would have been a 10 point penalty, and I just don't do penalties. So, in the midst of frantically trying to cut 10 seconds and re-transition everything so that it would be smooth flowing, and then mix-down the project, and then burn it to CD all in about 2 minutes by the time we turned the disk in I wasn't entirely sure what the final project sounded like. And that my friends was SCARY.
Luckily we were the only collegiate team to turn our project in on time which would mean that we were already 20 points ahead of them. The worst part of the competition was that we all got to sit and listen to everyones projects while the judges did their critique. When they played ours, I was a little horrified to note that some of our transitions had been muffled and weren't as great as I knew we could produce, but overall our audio quality and levels were better than the other teams, but it was largely up in the air.
Then came the wait. The competition finished up at about 3 p.m. and we had to wait until 6 for the awards ceremony to start up. I was starving by this point because I hadn't eaten anything all day (I can't eat when I'm nervous...) so our Professor treated us to lunch. :) He asked us if we liked greek food and I had a minor freak out because I don't like it, I LOVE the stuff. So he took us to this awesome place called the Greek Souvlaki that was truly divine. If you remotely like greek food, I would definitely reccomend it! I had the Gyro Plate, and was completely stuffed!
To be completely honest, no matter how many times our professor told us that he thought we had done really well and had probably taken gold, I just knew in my mind that we had lost. Epic. Fail. (Another evidence of my pessimism...yikes!) We arrived in plenty of time for the awards ceremony, were in our seats by 5:45 and then waited. And waited. And waited. AND WAITED! The stupid thing didn't even get going until after 6:30. Ugh, yet again. Then we looked at the program, and Audio Production didn't even get announced until the very end out of almost 70 competitions! Ugh, again again. For me, the longer I had to wait the more my nerves got completely out of control, to the point that I really had to focus on breathing by the time they announced our competition. When they said "Team 502, [Junior College]" I was soooooo dumbfounded, but SOOOOOOO excited!!!! All our hard work had TOTALLY paid off!!!! It was one of those euphoric feelings comprised of relief, gratitude, and so much more. Definite happiness. :)
(Oh yeah, and btw, the written exam didn't have anything from The Sound Effects Bible on it. WTF!? Oh well.)
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