Lots of choirs nowadays have sounds/lighting that are waaaay over the top and distracting. I believe Clinton has the perfect balance of set design and traditional singing and dancing. Amazing show as always. Also huge congrats to Auburn's groups who finished 2nd, 3rd, and 4th!
Had to laugh when David Fehr had them check the mics and that one was WAY hotter than the rest. No wonder there was a balance issue before. Clinton sounded SO much better in finals. And having those outer four screens working added so much! The Now Playing and Coming Soon posters helped me understand a lot better what was going on (and there were a couple movies represented that I hadn’t noticed in prelims).
I do wonder about the order of the movies? It seemed to be in chronological order, but then there were a couple movies out of place. So maybe some were just kind of random?
Anyway, Clinton should sweep this one. I wonder how they’ll stack up in a few weeks at Glenwood against some tough groups.
The variety of groups in finals is very interesting to me. I only watched the large Single-Gender and mixed divisions, so I don’t have an opinion if some groups should or should not have made finals, but I definitely did not expect for only two of the six finals spots to be large mixed groups. My guess is that the judges scored each group based off of how they did compared to the rest of the groups in there division, not based off who gave the best performance they would see all day. So for example, Spain Park might have made a higher score than Singers, but that score only reflects how they did in their division. So that might not mean that their score is higher because they’re better than Singers and they deserved to make finals more, the numbers just worked out like that. Because of the way the judges gave scores, the top six scores of the day basically ended up being the top scores in each division - not the scores that were necessarily the best shows of the whole day. That’s where competitions get tricky - what’s really the right way to score a comp or place people into finals??? The cookie crumbles differently each time.
Adding onto this, they did not announce prelims placements for the large mixed division, and I’m not sure why. If all the large mixed groups aren’t in finals, it would be nice to know how they did in their division just like the other groups got to...
Clinton's show is stunning. If they fix the blend/tech issues in finals (which I'm sure they will) then they'll most likely sweep. Auburn was great but Clinton's show design/flow/choreo can't be touched really. Vocals will be close, though. Good luck to everyone in finals! (I'm also very surprised to not see Oak Mountain in finals - just shows how great these Middle Mixed and Single-Gender groups are!)