Destination Prop Creation

About a month ago our team tackled Destination Imagination on the Provincial level, after tweaking our presentation from our first performance. Following Regionals, our team got together and discussed what needed to change, and how we could improve our performance. Through all of this we decided to add a few new things, one of them being a fake rock so we could play our music through a speaker hidden under the rock. I took the responsibility of making the rock over spring break and this is what this post will mainly be about. If you want to learn more about our entire performance, you can click here to head to my prior post.

Heading in to the creation of this prop I didn’t have a complete idea of what I was going to do. So I went to Rona and started looking at potential materials. I knew that I wanted to use some sort of chicken wire material that I could mould in to the shape I wanted and then use papier-mâché to cover it. So that’s what I did. I found the right kind of chicken wire for what I needed and then headed to Michaels to acquire the remaining materials. I couldn’t really find the right kind of paper I was looking for, so I was almost accepting defeat after searching the entire store. So I picked up the other things I needed; glue and spray paint.

When I was queuing to checkout, I watched as the lady at the till wrapped up someone’s purchase in some kind of tissue paper. So when I got to the checkout I asked the lady if I could by any chance take some of that paper. She was very kind and told me that she wasn’t supposed to, however, she was nice enough to give me plenty of it. I guess I just got lucky.

Once I started constructing the faux rock I discovered that chicken wire isn’t quite as maluable as I had anticipated. I really struggled with it as I tried to bend it in to the desired shape. I had to fetch a pair of gloves so my hands didn’t get cut by the sharp ends of the chicken wire. Eventually after a lot of effort and with the help of gods greatest invention; duct tape, I managed to have a shape that resembled a rock. Next up it was time to papier-mâché the hell out of this thing. I created a concoction of glue water and flour with a pretty runny consistency and proceeded to douce the paper strips in it and slap them on the metal rock skeleton. About half an hour later it was just about covered in papier-mâché.

At this point, my work was done for a while, in fact, it was done for a long time. I then went on vacation for nearly two weeks and once I came back, the rock was nice and solid, so it was time to spray paint. I had bought a super nice can of spray paint. The paint itself was textured to feel like an actual rock, so it made my fake rock look a lot more like a real one. This was definitely the most fun part of the job, spray painting is always a good time.

So there you have it, the story of me creating a fake rock.

Anyways, I’m sure you want to know how DI Provincials went, and I’d be happy to tell you that they went well, unfortunately, that’s not the case, they went pretty poorly in fact. Our main challenge was pretty early, we were the first of our challenge type to present. We were super prepared and ready to go, except I was pretty sick. I’m not really sure what went wrong. All I can say is that in the future I’m definitely going to make sure my team practices how we were going to move stuff as the performance is going on, because we were sort of using improv throughout. Our acting was pretty good I was told, however there were a couple line mishaps, but that’s not at all what bothers me. In fact, there’s not really anything about our DI performances that annoyed me.

At the end of the day, even though our results on paper weren’t the greatest, we still put a lot of time and effort in to this. Also, this kind of project isn’t exactly our speciality, and I think we did a great job in that respect. When it comes to myself, I’m most proud of how I managed to swallow my pride and really put effort in to my acting, to better not only myself but my teammates. All in all, DI is almost always going to be a success in at least some regards, and this year is no exception.