Getting Started - 1

To begin this professional development project, I started by emailing my hopeful primary sources and beginning some cursory online research.

I sent emails this afternoon to Prof. Dave Woodley, the director of athletic bands here at IU, Dr. Eric Smedley, the assistant director of athletic bands and associate professor of music in the band department, and Ben Alaniz, a graduate student studying wind conducting and working with the Marching Hundred as an associate instructor. I chose these people specifically because of their availability here at IU, and because each has different experiences with writing drill for marching bands. Prof. Woodley writes the majority of the halftime shows for the Marching Hundred in addition to some experience designing competitive shows for some high school band programs; Dr. Smedley writes at least one show per season for the Marching Hundred and has worked as a judge for high school marching band competitions; and Ben Alaniz has almost no experience writing drill of his own, but he is writing a halftime show for the Marching Hundred this year, so his perspective and experiences may be similar to mine as I learn more about the field. 
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I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of self-published sites and forum-based topics regarding marching band drill writing. There seem to be a handful of drill writers and show design companies that explain their processes, and even for those who don't, by perusing some contact forms and quote request forms, I can gain some insight into the beginning of their processes. While a creative endeavor like this can be difficult to put into form and structure sometimes, there are inherent needs for organization and consistency in the activity of marching band, so even though there are likely creative constraints with any organizational method, it seems that most publicly available drill writers and show designers have some aspect of a pattern or format to get things started.