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SF Live! Online Edition 2022

Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2022 6:44 pm
by sleepysilverdoor
BROADCAST WILL BE

8 OCTOBER 2022 @ 9 PM EDT
9 OCTOBER 2022 @ 0100 ZULU

Hey everybody!

So I think most of us agree that the SF Live online was a tremendously fun time over the past couple of years. And since I haven't seen anyone say "I'll do it!" in regards to hosting the affair, I'l say "I'll do it!".

If there are any newcomers who weren't here for the last couple go-rounds, essentially the essence was to create a few nights where we all submit video sets of ourselves performing our work for each other, in the spirit of a "live show".

Rules:

Videos are due October 1 2022
Please render your videos in H.264 1080p and email them to catfish.deity@gmail.com
Include your artist name and set list please!

Set limit is 15 minutes. One set per artist. If you wanna submit 15 one minute songs or 1 fifteen minute song, that's up to you.
At least one of your songs must have been composed for SongFight! (though Spintunes and Nur Ein tunes are welcome...just don't submit a set of entirely unrelated material!)

Up to two music videos are welcome per artist, but ideally these should be made for/premiering on the live stream!
And if you wanna make some bumpers -- y'know, the little promotional things reminding you that you're listening to a SongFight stream -- make as many as you want! Just keep them 30s or less please.

The "live fight!" will follow the broadcast on a yet-to-be-determined date.

Please don't suck.

Re: SF Live! 2022 Online Edition

Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2022 8:59 pm
by Lunkhead
You can see the past two years' online Song Fight Lives on the Song Fight YouTube channel!

https://www.youtube.com/c/songfight/videos

Re: SF Live! 2022 Online Edition

Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2022 12:58 pm
by fluffy
I'm definitely in, and I can also probably help out with production of the show itself.

From the past few years the biggest learning is that it's easiest to produce the whole show up-front and do it as a Premiere on YouTube, and only doing a live stream for the "live" fight so that the vote can be in real time. Spud wrote a fun interactive applause-o-meter which is what we used in 2020 and 2021. YouTube itself provides a realtime poll function but that's absolutely not the same.

Re: SF Live! 2022 Online Edition

Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2022 10:48 am
by sleepysilverdoor
Well good news, having assistance would definitely help.

Should we do a poll asking when people's ideal timeline for this would be?

Re: SF Live! 2022 Online Edition

Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2022 11:17 am
by Lunkhead
Yeah, that sounds like a good idea!

Re: SF Live! 2022 Online Edition

Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2022 11:35 am
by fluffy
Definitely. I think you can edit your first post in the thread to add a poll.

At this point it seems like August is the absolute earliest which makes sense.

Re: SF Live! 2022 Online Edition

Posted: Thu Jul 07, 2022 12:06 pm
by sleepysilverdoor
There, now everyone can specify their preferred general timespan.

Re: SF Live! Online Edition 2022

Posted: Thu Jul 07, 2022 12:20 pm
by Lunkhead
I voted for early October.

Re: SF Live! Online Edition 2022

Posted: Thu Jul 07, 2022 12:30 pm
by fluffy
nice Gaussian distribution you got there

Re: SF Live! Online Edition 2022

Posted: Thu Jul 07, 2022 12:49 pm
by sleepysilverdoor
How long shall we leave the poll up? A week? I figure we have some prospective participants that might not log in every day.

Re: SF Live! Online Edition 2022

Posted: Thu Jul 07, 2022 1:09 pm
by fluffy
That seems like a good plan yeah. Maybe something could be posted on Song News, Lunkhead?

Re: SF Live! Online Edition 2022

Posted: Thu Jul 07, 2022 1:53 pm
by Lunkhead
Good idea!

Re: SF Live! Online Edition 2022

Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2022 3:27 pm
by crumpart
I voted for October onwards. I’m speaking and exhibiting at a printmaking conference in the UK in September, so pretty much all my time from now until then is focussing on making work for that. Afterwards is free game though!

Re: SF Live! Online Edition 2022

Posted: Mon Jul 11, 2022 6:06 am
by Pigfarmer Jr
I have a few weeks off from school in August so I voted for late August. But come to think of it, if* I plan ahead, I can get stuff done in August and it'll be ready for anytime after that. It would be helpful to know if there is a change in the kind of videos would be expected by August, though. Or any guidelines, for real.

*if is a word I use a lot when I mean "probably won't"

Re: SF Live! Online Edition 2022

Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2022 11:37 am
by sleepysilverdoor
Okay, so basically the guidelines for the sorts of videos are:

Submit a set, no more than 15 minutes in length, of you *performing* your own work, with material composed for/inspired by SongFight/Spintunes/Nur Ein being preferred but by no means required. Artists choosing to showcase other songs they've written is fine too, so long as they're an active participant in the SongFight! community.

If you want to submit some sort of intermission bump or jingle, those are also certainly welcome and encouraged.

Significant post-editing and multi-tracking of live performances is acceptable and commonplace, especially since so many of us are solo acts. Videos *must be created for this SF Live 2022*. Pre-recorded music videos or live shows aren't really in the spirit of the event, which is to create a shared online community-oriented parallel to the "in person" songfight live, in which people songfight in a live setting.

The show may be split up among a couple of nights depending on how many videos we get.

After the performance broadcasts, the next SongFight title will be the title for the live fight, in which people have one week to submit videos of an ORIGINAL song using the title. Same rules as regular songfight, but in video format with a performance element. I'm not sure how the voting for that would go -- in years past it has been done live via a webpage with a "vote" button. I'd personally prefer doing it like standard songfight voting for people who can't watch the broadcast due to timezone issues, but if others disagree with that idea I'm not wed to it.

Anyway, does October 1-ish sound like a good due date for videos? And the following week for the live fight? I'd like to hear from the previous organizers and participants in what worked/didn't work in years past.

Re: SF Live! Online Edition 2022

Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2022 11:44 am
by fluffy
That all sounds good to me. I have mixed feelings about the idea of eschewing the live vote for the live fight, but I think I'm generally in favor of it. I know that others will vehemently disagree though, but it does definitely make a lot of aspects of the live fight easier to deal with. Doing pre-edited shows as a premiere is way less stress than doing a live stream, and way less can go wrong.

Something to keep in mind is that you'll probably want at least a week between the video due dates and the showtimes, since you need time to edit/upload/process the show and you don't get the broadcast URL until the upload starts.

Re: SF Live! Online Edition 2022

Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2022 12:22 pm
by sleepysilverdoor
I mean it's not that I don't enjoy the "you have to watch the stream to vote" button. For one, it encourages the community aspect of the thing. However, where SF live involves everybody being physically together and thus in the same time zone, SF Live online is so spread out. I mean what's bedtime for me is dinnertime for fluffy and the middle of the night for crumpart and like the start of the workday for gizo and furrypedro. So imo it doesn't seem quite fair to make the live fight voting contingent on where I live. That being said -- the same is true of the stream itself, so I dunno, I don't think there's a perfect solution really. I'll leave that one up for debate by others.

Re: SF Live! Online Edition 2022

Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2022 3:29 pm
by fluffy
The thing about a premiere (ot even a stream) is that anyone can watch it any time. Although they can’t join in on the chat. But there’s still comments on the video page.

Re: SF Live! Online Edition 2022

Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2022 9:34 am
by Lunkhead
Thanks again for taking this up! That mostly sounds good.

Re: the voting, even with the IRL event, voting in the live fight was limited to whoever could attend, so I don't personally see the timezone issues as being very different from that. Not saying it's ideal and of course it's easy for me to say because I'm within +/- a couple hours of whenever it'd be likely to happen. But hey, if we usually have two variants of the same fight (live IRL and on songfight.org), maybe we could just add another one? We could set up a thread on the boards with a poll for voting on the best online "live" fight video and leave that open a day or two after the online "live" fight to give more folks a chance to watch the recording of the stream and vote. So we could have a live voting winner, a board poll slightly delayed winner, and the normal fight winner.

Also I actually have really enjoyed folks' "music videos" (videos that were not "performance" videos) in the past online SFLs. Do those need to be excluded? Maybe new music videos that were made for SFL could be allowed and only old/pre-existing videos could excluded?

Re: SF Live! Online Edition 2022

Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2022 9:49 am
by fluffy
I was a fan of the pre-existing music videos being added in as part of the overall show, but it also made for many more, much longer shows. In 2020 they were helpful for getting people excited to record sets for the “live” portions, but now that the whole “online SFLive” concept is better-established I don’t see them as being necessary. They’re still fun, though, and I love them as a way of letting us see things that we might not have normally ended up watching.

So, I’d like to see them still be a part of the show.

Re: SF Live! Online Edition 2022

Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2022 12:30 pm
by sleepysilverdoor
I like the "new content made for SF!L" rule. Cause otherwise it just turns into a playlist of "let's watch old content from the artists" which doesn't really seem to be in the spirit of the event. Though I personally attest to submitting a video I made in 2016 to SF!L 2020 -- and the existing music videos other people submitted were fun. However, there *was* a bit too much content. Or maybe there wasn't too much content. Is there such a thing as too much content? I don't remember getting annoyed by it. Sure, old videos are fine. Limit one per artist though unless anyone really objects to that?

Re: SF Live! Online Edition 2022

Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2022 1:36 pm
by Lunkhead
Sure. We can always share "extra" content on the Song Fight! YouTube channel, or have folks post it to their channels and make a playlist of them on the Song Fight channel, maybe do a listening party or something for that after. Lots of options. It'd be great to hear what more folks think about it though, so if anybody is reading and lurking, please share your thoughts!