Public webcams have officially run the gamut of subject material. The first webcam starred a coffee pot. Next came sexy teenagers, pandas and now, UVA’s Cavalier Marching Band. The appropriately named “bandcam,” featured on their website, sits atop the band’s storage facility and displays a view of their practice field that is akin to nosebleed seats at a baseball game. The image updates itself every eight seconds, though viewers may manually refresh the page for five second intervals instead.
Not terribly advanced for the YouTube age, you say, but still, some band members have high hopes for the bandcam. “I think it’s great, especially for people who live out of state whose parents might never get a chance to come to a football game,” says Drum Major Bryan Myers. Despite the lack of visual excitement and impossibility of telling one dot-of-a-person apart from another, there is presumably a sense of closeness conveyed by being able to see one’s own son or daughter in real time as they practice.
The Cavalier Marching Band steps to the beat of a five second refresh button on the Web.
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For those not hip to the UVA marching band scene, the Cavalier Marching Band was formed in Fall 2004 after a $1.5 million donation by Carl and Hunter Smith was given to the University in 2003. The donation followed the defunding of the previous UVA band, the Virginia Pep Band, which had offended numerous people (including the entire state of West Virginia). The Cavalier Marching Band, a more traditionally structured marching band in contrast to the Pep Band’s scramble style, currently includes 218 UVA students and 12 members from Piedmont Virginia Community College.
When not making an appearance on the web, the Cavalier Marching Band performs at every UVA home football game in addition to a few away games per season. As far as what’s in store this fall, the band has “some pretty special guests coming to perform with [them], nationally recognized artists…as well as a pretty nice tribute that we have in store for the Virginia Tech game,” says Myers.
Any bandcam jitters? According to fellow Drum Major Lauren Schmidt, “compared to the 63,000 fans at a football game, it doesn’t seem that nerve-wracking. I think the more people who get to see what we’re really about, the better.”
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