Yes, I have asked myself this question many times, how am I supposed to do destination imagination online? Well I am here to tell you it is possible! It may have been weird but we did it and it wasn’t half bad.

Destination imagination provincials was cancelled, but of course for PLP we kept going and did our own version. This meant we had to preform online, with ALL of our props still at school. As we found out though there were some advantages to this, such as virtual backgrounds which compared to our last backdrop are amazing! Getting ready to preform was somewhat difficult because we had to FaceTime each other and come up with a plan to rebuild an invention, use backdrops, make impact scenery and include some technical methods in what we made. Of course having only a few days not all of this was possible, but we made what we could.

 

Rebuilding an alarm clock box turned out to be easier than we initially thought. When we had first built our invention we had used wood which took a while to cut and nail together, this time we needed a quick solution. We came up with using a shoe box, this way you could flip the lid around and create the same puzzle but a lot quicker. At the time building everything seemed like our biggest challenge, but looking back now I think one of the biggest challenges was trying to interact with each other and not talk over one another. As we were practicing we really had to know our lines and when to speak, otherwise no one could be heard. Luckily we didn’t run into to many problems there, we all knew our lines and when to speak.

 

As for the interacting part we had to try different things. In the original performance people would turn and talk to each other, now that we don’t know where everyone is on the screen, we had to try facing forward, and using names to let people know who they were talking to. When people were handing stuff to each other during the performance we decided to stick our hand past the camera pretending to either pass or receive an object.

 

Along with the challenges, there were also bonuses with preforming online. As I mentioned earlier virtual background are AMAZING, and super helpful. At regionals our backdrop wasn’t one of our best features and was something we wanted to improve on for provincials. Now that it was online we had virtual backgrounds which was a lot less work that trying to rebuild a backdrop. We decided we were going to still use tie dye as our background, but that we were also going to have a background for the bedroom. There are some difficult things with using a virtual background which is changing from one background to another quickly can be a bit difficult. This was something we actually had to practice as there are parts where we all needed to change our background at roughly the same time. In the end we somehow managed to do it, and get our backgrounds so they switched somewhat together. One more small problem we had was, sometimes our body or one of our props would be cut off by the background. This was something we couldn’t really do much about. It was either fully see props with no background or sometimes see props with background. We chose the first one!

Here are the backgrounds we used,

After we had set everything up, and were prepared and practiced the day came where we had to try this seemingly impossible feat. Of course our team was first up! Which could either be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. Either way we thought we were pretty ready, which seemed crazy considering we had just put this together. We preformed on a tool called zoom, an online video conference tool. Once we were all there and ready we started, it went better than I thought it would. We were all ready and knew what to do, we had improved on the parts that were lacking in score from regionals. The performance went smoothly and the we were done! Well almost done we still had the instant challenge later that day.

 

The instant challenge was really fun and I think we enjoyed doing this one more. I think that impacted our result, as I feel as a team we did better, and worked together more. Overall the whole online Destination Imagination was a really cool experience. It was about expanding our mind and seeing different solutions to a problem. I had more fun than I thought I would which is a success in my mind. My team and me had created a performance that improved on our last one, and made it possible to preform online.

 

“The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”

– Dolly Parton