Welcome to my summative blog post about Destination Imagination 2021. This was a crazy challenge, and included some late nights, but it was lots of fun.

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What Was This Project❓

Destination Imagination is an international tournament where students are given a challenge that falls under a subject and they have to come up with a solution. My challenge of choice was the technical challenge. In this challenge my groups assignment was to create a video in the style of a video game where an adventurer went on a quest to attain an ultimate prize. The adventurer also had to have a special ability that helped them. You can read more about the challenges here.

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What Are Some Things I Did 📝

Paper Work 📑

The first part of the project was filling out some sheets that would help us manage who in the group was in charge of what and when it needed to be done by. Also as a part of this was to fill out a sheet where we had to identify each part of our challenge. This was where we started to come up with our team choice elements which ended up being an original soundtrack and original sound effects. We were originally going to do original soundtrack and historically accurate fighting styles and weapons but we ended up switching that out. Below is an example of one of the sheets.

Writing ✍️

Part of the challenge was telling a story. Is was part of the group. That was in charge of writing a script. Our story was about an adventurer who had landed in this place called the in between. The in between is a place between life’s. Our adventurer needed to get out in a certain amount of time or he would be stuck there for eternity. Our adventurer needed to kill Cerberus in order to unlock a gate which led back to earth. The adventurer did have the help of a guide to find all the things he needed to make the tool to kill Cerberus. You can read a scene from our script below.

Post Production 🖥

I was in charge of editing and visual effects for our groups project. This was a big task and took a long time but it was worth it for the end result. I used a combination of Blender for the 3D aspects, DaVinci Resolve Fusion for compositing and DaVinci Resolve for Editing. I have talked about Blender and DaVinci Resolve already on this blog so I’m not going to spend to much time on them. I you are interested in learning more about either of them click the links on the words above.

A big part of this was file management. I kept everything on an external hard drive so that I could move files between devices for editing. Below you can see some of my file explorer windows with all the footage and other stuff.

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An Area I Struggled 😬

The most difficult part of Destination Imagination was filming. We didn’t have a lot of time to do it and it all needed to be on green screen. Also a tricky part was we had to know what the shot was gonna look like with the vfx so that we could film everything to work in post with any CGI elements. The biggest solution to this was to stay organized. I made a shot list for our group so we knew what we had filmed and what we needed to film. I also had story boarded our entire video out before hand so that we knew what the final shots would likely look like.

The other struggle was definitely the instant challenges. For these we were given a short amount of time to complete a challenge. I’m not allow to say much about it but I don’t think we did very well on it. It was an interesting experience and I learned that I don’t do my best work under such a short time crunch.

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Final Thoughts ❗️

This was a fun project but a difficult one. I learned a lot from doing it and I am proud of most of the work that I created during it. I learned a lot about how to work with different types if people in a group and how to find ways to include everyone’s ideas. I also learned a lot about dividing up tasks in group projects and how you can do that. There is even more I learned but that would be a long list. One last thing that I would want to include is that I learned a lot about film making its self and how to create vfx in a short time period.

Please watch my groups DI video and let me know what you think on the comments of this post.