Before the show ever hits the turf, an army of hidden creators map out every note and coordinate behind the scenes. The band director, musical arranger, percussion writer, and drill writer all reflect on how “The Final Flight” went from an idea on a blank screen to a true story living on the field.

By: Cody Sample

To our student body sitting in the stadium bleachers, a marching show is just a magical experience. Under the blazing Friday night lights or on a crispy Saturday morning contest block, everything looks effortless.

You see the flash of polished brass, an amazing colorful wall from the color guard, and a field full of amazing marchers moving with almost unbelievable precision into shapes that give it meaning.

This season, our band is bringing that exact kind of magical moment to life with “The Final Flight,” a production following Amelia Earhart and her plane cutting across the Atlantic before disappearing into the grey open ocean.

It starts with the August heat baking off the artificial turf, sore shoulders from holding horn angles, and staring at a sheet full of field coordinates until your eyes blur.

Standing in the block is an incredible rush, but it always leaves you wondering: Where does any of this actually come from?

Long before a single snare drum echoes across an empty practice field or the band makes its first opening impact, an entire world is pulled out of almost thin air by a handful of people behind the scenes.

Show designers, arrangers, and drill writers spend months in rooms together hashing it out, translating the director’s vision into a truly unique story.

The Blueprint

Every show starts with absolute nothingness. During the months leading up to band camp, the band director and the design team sit down with a blank slate and an almost impossible task.

They have to decide what a stadium full of people is going to hear, see, and feel six months from now.

According to band director Jordan Ray, the process actually kicks off early. “We start gathering ideas probably during the winter break, and I just start storyboarding different ideas,” Ray said. “Usually in late January, I send the ideas to our design staff…and we usually try to have the overall kind of theme picked by the end of March.”

For a narrative show like The Final Flight, the challenge is even more complex. As Ray says, the team initially wanted a lighter theme that kids could easily connect to.

But inspiration took a turn: “We thought the idea of Amelia Earhart was kind of cool because it was this big mystery. And then the more we sat with it, we kind of wanted to make it more about just the idea of her very last flight. So it took a little darker turn… We want to keep it more mysterious than anything else.”

How do you take the mysterious sound of a hurricane and her plane getting lost at sea, stretch it across nine minutes of stunning drill, and slowly steer it into the terrifying silence of a storm over the ocean as she spirals down? That first phase is all about building the emotional foundation of the entire production before a single note is heard by anyone.

Creating the Art

Once the story has a shape, the music has to be born. Writing for a marching band is completely different from writing for a concert band piece.

An arranger cannot just write pretty chords; they have to build a wall of sound powerful enough to travel across an open field and reach judges sitting high in the press box.

For composer John Meehan, creating a completely original score for “The Final Flight” was an exciting challenge. “I love finding a story, then creating a piece of music to help tell that story,” Meehan says. “Having the story of Amelia Earhart, and being able to create themes and other musical elements to try and create the emotion and feel of her and her life was a ton of fun.”

Meehan says that his process begins with asking the staff as many questions as possible to capture their vision before building a template and getting to work. While limitations like instrumentation or soloists can present hurdles, he views them as creative catalysts: “By having to change my approach, or think outside the box, it allows me to do things different.”

At the same time, the percussion writers are building the heartbeat—what makes the show feel alive. The battery and the front ensemble have to lock into a rhythmic engine that mimics the atmosphere of Amelia Earhart and keeps the entire band in time.

Turning Music into Structure

With the music taking shape, the drill writer steps onto the field with a blank grid. This is where the art of the music collides with the movement of the band, turning sound into something that can be seen across the field.

The drill writer takes the music and translates it into coordinate sheets, calculating step sizes, intervals, and movement from one set to the next. The goal is to make around 148 band members move as one, creating formations that reinforce the story being told through the music.

For “The Final Flight,” that means creating everything from large, recognizable formations to scattered movements that reflect the chaos of the storm.

Every set has to look effective from the stands or press box while also making physical sense for the students executing it on the turf.

Assistant Band Director and Choreographer Daniel Larsen works closely with the design team to bridge the gap between sound and movement. Managing visual coordination involves constant collaboration with caption heads and the drill writer through master spreadsheets and revisions.

When designing choreography, Larsen balances accessibility with creativity: “A lot of what I’m planning is geared towards trying to decide between, okay, let’s start here [lower body focus], but I also don’t want to sit in that box all the time. Right? So I’m trying to find ways to be creative, fit the music, and then also use the vocabulary that we’ve been building in terms of lunges, pliés, and line shapes.”

Giving the Show Life

Then August arrives, and the months of isolated writing, endless revisions, and digital score editing finally hit the band. All of that hard work is finally presented to the students, with a long season still ahead of them.

Even after its initial debut, the show undergoes a continuous process of small rewrites. As Jordan Ray notes regarding mid-season changes, the team works closely with their drill writer within contractual boundaries to adapt and polish the production: “The drill writer is really great in terms of whatever we want to do…it just depends on how much we’re changing.”

For the staff, those moments make every hour of planning worthwhile. Daniel Larsen describes it as a “sandwich” experience: “I really like the initial stage of learning and creating…and then the end of that is what it all starts coming together. When it finally starts coming together, it’s like, oh, okay, there’s the effect that’s being created.”

John Meehan says that sentiment from the composer’s desk “There’s nothing more rewarding than hearing and seeing your music come to life by the students… The reason (some) of us do this, is for the students, and helping them achieve at the highest levels they can.”

The next time the lights come on and “The Final Flight” takes the field, the audience will see nine minutes of music, movement and storytelling. What they won’t see are the months of conversations, revisions, coordinates, compositions and countless decisions that came before it. They’ll see the show. Behind it is an entire team of people who imagined it first.

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Cody Sample
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Cody '28, is a junior in his first year of journalism at Redwood. He is a passionate Arts & Entertainment writer, and he loves telling stories!

 

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