It’s been a whole year since we last participated in Destination Imagination, and it’s time to do it all over again. This year, I am in a group with Melanie, Lauren, Tamara, Alivia, and Jessie. We chose the challenge Change of Tune, meaning that we were tasked with creating a musical of two acts to present in an eight-minute timeframe. This proved to be more of a challenge than we thought it would be, but I’ll get into that in a minute. We have worked since early December on this project, and have come a long way since then. In summary, our story is about a summer camp that has a secret relic located on it, and a group of kids sneak out to go find it but are hit with many a few complications along the way including an ancient society, a curse, and a potentially evil counselor.
We started with planning out how we were going to approach this challenge. A few months were spent planning our solution before we were able to finally start working. In our group, we decided to delegate the jobs we had to complete between the six of us. I ended up being in charge of music and lyrics with the help of Jessie. According to the rules of the challenge, we had to implement music and lyrics to help tell the story in some form into both acts of the musical, and all music had to be made by us. The first step was to plan out where the music went, which we did by finding any uncomfortable breaks within the script that Tamara had been in charge of writing. Next, Jessie, Melanie, and Tamara worked to write some of the lyrics to the first few songs we created. Finally, I was in charge of creating the background music and rhythms to add to the lyrics that we would sing. The music was a very fun part of this project.
While we worked on the music, the rest of my group had their own tasks to resolve. Alivia was in charge of building the set base, Melanie was tasked with creating a fabric backdrop which we could then spin around the set base, and Lauren was in charge of choreographing a final dance number in our performance. After everyone had created their pieces separately, we figured out that when we put them all together, nothing worked. The fabric backdrop that Melanie had made didn’t fit onto or spin around the set base that Alivia had built, and the dance number and songs that Lauren, Jessie, and I had made didn’t fit into the eight-minute time frame with the script that Tamara had made. It was at this point that we realized that we had a lot more on our plate then we had originally thought.
The first thing to revise was the script, songs, and dance number. We decided to cut out the dance number, which we were planning to use as our Spectacle, which is supposed to be a memorable event sometime during our musical using different production techniques such as costumes or sound effects. We instead changed the opening song, which is set around a campfire, to our spectacle using props and masks as our production techniques. Next, we edited the script countless (there was a total of seven versions we went through before the regional tournament) and ended up cutting out a lot of it so we could fit the important parts of the story in in time. The songs had to be adjusted quite a bit, mainly because the tunes were too repetitive and long. We also ended up just standing uncomfortably while we were singing a couple of the songs and had to implement simple dance choreography using hand motions to make it more interesting and visually appealing. After weeks of revisions though, the storyline and acting part of our presentation was finally up to par.
The next thing we had to revise was the physical aspects of our solution such as the set, props, and costumes. Tamara and Lauren created costumes for the campers to wear featuring a plain white tee shirt with a logo for our team. Tamara’s character, a member of a long lost group of creatures called Ukugulians, wore a traditional greek toga and a crown. The biggest issue that we faced, however, was our set. We wanted to have a flat board as the base set piece, and then have a long piece of fabric wrap around it that could spin to change scene locations to a cave. After testing ways to make this work for weeks, we decided that it wasn’t going to work with the resources that we had and that we needed to change it. We eventually decided to attach some of the fabric to the front side of the board, and then suspend the cave piece rolled up on a dowel above the set. We were able to use a battery powered drill to spin the dowel up and down, and this made the whole process run a lot smoother. Last but not least, after everyone worked together to bring in some props to use in the presentation, we needed a way to store them. We originally chose to keep them in a box and then grab them when we needed them, but ultimately that was going to be chaotic and messy, so I stayed after school one day to attach all of the props with elastic and velcro to the back of our set so we could easily see what we needed and when. The physical pieces of our musical were easily the hardest part of the project to make work right, but we finally got everything on track.
REGIONAL TOURNAMENT TIME!
This year, the regionals of Destination Imagination were held at none other than right here at Seycove! This saved us the trouble of transporting our set to another school and back, and was easier overall because we were already familiar and comfortable with the room we were presenting in. On the day of the presentation, our dowel that held the cave up started to splinter and ended up not working properly because of this. We did have quite a few technical difficulties, but all in all we kept the show going. Here is the video of our Regional Destination Imagination performance!
PREPARING AND PRESENTING AT PROVINCIALS
The next step was to start preparing for the Provincial tournament. We came to the conclusion that we should scrap the set that we had since it was starting to break. We then worked together to build and paint a new set, revise our storyline, and add in a new song and dance. This process took up until the day before the tournament. We put many hours into planning, creating, learning, and memorizing all of the new implementations to the presentation. After we worked so hard, our hard work finally paid off and we presented at the Provincial Tournament. We ended up getting first place in both our performance and our instant challenge! After all the work we put into it, it was so rewarding to earn first.