So then I got to thinking- what if we all did?

 

You know how we all moan about American Idol and Glee and how they sing such terrible songs and so on... how about, in the most epic PA event ever, we had a forum wide "talent" hunt, our very own prog based idol contest?

 

How would it work?

Well everyone would need a youtube account and a webcam which I see as not a very big deal, can be sorted very easily. Most PCs have built in cams anyway.

 

Ideally it would have its own sub-forum too.

 

I think videos should be capped at 3 minutes regardless of the length of the original song or otherwise things will get too long to watch.

Perhaps for the semi-finals we will increase that to 5 to get a little more epic and to 6 for the finals.

Applicants can sing a capella, vocalising an instrumental solo, singing along to an instrumental if they have one, or perform the song on an instrument. They are invited to dress up like the artist or do other theatrical proggy touches.

It would be great if someone who works for PA can actually arrange for prizes for say the final four people, whether it's a CD voucher or a t-shirt or tickets to something and so on.

This could be an annual event or a one-off, let's see how it goes.

 

Step 1: Sign-up. We need to know how many people are interested in competing. 16 is a good number for knockout purposes and I'd probably cap it there.

 

Step 2: Audition round. Only required if we have more than 16 applicants. For this round the applicants can select any prog song they like to perform. A panel of three judges who are not competing go to the audition thread and whittle it down to 16 by tossing out those they agree among themselves are not the best. They will explain why with reasons and won't be abusive but rather give genuine feedback.

 

Step 3: Knockout rounds. One on one knockout action with maybe a new round going up every day in its own thread, hoping people can produce the videos quickly enough. (They should be fairly impromptu easy things to do.) As for content, I would probably theme the two groups of eight, with a specific genre, or non-english round or a female vocalist original song, or a judge's choice where everyone has to handle the same song and so on. Once the two videos are produced, the contestants email the youtube links to a judge who then creates a poll thread with the two videos in it. The poll would have a 3 day limit or so.

 

Step 4: Finals. The same as above but the ante will be raised with higher expectations. I imagine to make it a little more epic, the final will be a best of three.

 

There should also be a general chatter thread in the sub-folder.

 

So obviously there's a little more detail that could be fleshed out but there's the basic concept. What do you think? Sounds fun? Or does it sound like the purest essence of finest suck?

 

I think if there's interest, this could really be done without too much hard work but result in some legendary laughs.

Some freaky sh*t I made 10 years ago. 

im gonna sit sit back and laugh at you guys 

 

Doesn't seem like there's that much interest though. I suppose we can do it with just 8 but sixteen would be more epic and thus proggy. But for the time being we don't even have 8.

 

I was actually thinking of being a judge/administrator and not personally competing.

 

You also benefit from a subversive "vote for the worst" attitude I could easily see springing up.

However so far this isn't getting the response I anticipated so I might forget about it if there isn't more interest shown.

 

Or maybe JJL and I can have a best of 17 one on one tournament.