The Destination Imagination experience

Hey Y’all, Max here.

The Performance Learning Program has a tradition of entering their Grade 8 ( and I believe 9 ) PLP classes into Destination Imagination. This year is my first year in PLP, and I was excited to be competing in DI, as I had seen my eldest brother compete in Destination Imagination, and it looked like a really fun experience. 

Oh, and one quick note. In this blog post, when I say something like “ stressed to the breaking point “, or “ immensely overwhelmed “ I’m not addressing the whole of DI, just the one task or deadline, and even then I’m probably dramatizing to add length to my blog post. Oops. 

During the whole DI experience, I felt like there was a lot of pressure to succeed, and I believe that was why I was easily stressed by DI, and felt like it was overly complicated. 

While there may be a lot of rules and things you have to do to prepare, present, and reflect upon Destination imagination, it actually isn’t that complicated. 

There are multiple teams consisting of around 5 people, who are each given a challenge. The challenge subjects this year were Engineering, Fine Arts, Technical, and Scientific. 

I was put in Engineering, and my team members were Alfie , Mateo , Gwen, Faith , Ines , and Sam . Collectively, we formed our own sort of Power Ranger group, and we named ourselves the Mechanized Mechanical Mechanics, or MMM for short. 

Every teams challenge was slightly different this year, as Current World Events are still present, and teams could not perform in front of a live audience. I personally am grateful for this change, as I am not a big fan of performing in front of an audience, and I feel much more comfortable behind a camera. I’m sure my team felt the same way. 

Our team’s engineering challenge this year was to make a model of a building that had two style elements, and two different style features. Our 2 style features were postmodernism as our architecture style, and renaissance as our visual style. On the other hand, our 2 style elements were: miniature furniture handmade by Gwen , and also the use of another language 

( Which was skillfully executed in Spanish by Mateo ). 

Building the model was another story entirely. My team met up on weekends and in our spare time to work occasionally, but I think we all felt like we were lagging behind a bit, and so we tried to find as much time to work on DI as we could. We met up at school to build the model on a weekend, and that went pretty smoothly. I mostly worked on the story ( more on that later ) so I contributed less to the model, but I think that one thing we could have done to our model was add more of each style feature. Aside from that, I think that my team and I did a great job building and decorating our model.  

Extremely early version of model made by Ines

Interior of final model

Overall, I think the model building part of Destination Imagination went pretty okay, and I think we did an impressive job making it. I must say that most or all of the credit goes towards my teammates for this, as I did minimal work making the structure itself. 

The next crucial step in the Destination Imagination Process went towards writing the story. ( In other words, this is the part of the summative blog post where I can brag about “contributing the most“ to one part of DI ) The story was mainly written by Alfred and I, although all team members chimed in at some point to offer suggestion, whether they be boring, used, clichéd, or occasionally, helpful. 

The process of writing the story was not as difficult as some other parts of Destination Imagination, although I will admit there were some instances of stress, and more than one panicked FaceTime with Alfie. I think I was put in charge of the story-building because I am probably the best with words in my group, and because everything with words comes naturally to me. One thing I can take away from writing the story: make sure you know what you’re doing, and assign yourself to an area you excel, or at least understand. This especially applies if it’s your first time competing in DI, and you are unsure of your role.

Remember, the story isn’t presented this year, instead it’s filmed. That means we don’t have to have all the stress and nerves of presenting to an audience, but it does mean something potentially worse: filming. Filming requires an entire group to be able to plan a time to meet up, it requires everyone to promise to meet up at the planned date, and it requires everyone to actually meet up when they promise. But you know us teenagers, with our busy schedules. So when someone can’t come because they forgot they had a swim meet, you gotta be able to improvise on the spot, and think of a solution. Quick. I’m probably dramatizing to a fair point, but it felt like it took forever to film all the required scenes. The biggest challenge here was probably with some of my teammates. I’m not saying they negatively impacted the progress of our filming, I’m just noting that when you have to herd them like cattle, it tends to get annoying. I’m just glad we were even able to film everything, especially with such strict due dates. 

So you got the story done, you got the filming done, but what about the editing? Y’know, the way to put your short movie together? Yeah. This is where things went south, and I went a little crazy in the process. I took on too many responsibilities. 

I was the forms DRI ( directly responsible individual – in other words, the person who gets chewed out if anything happens. Yay. ) and the editor of the movie. Who knew these would be such ridiculously frustrating jobs? 

As soon as I volunteered/was peer pressured to become the DRI, I got to my tasks immediately. Well, not immediately. I happened to have DI-unrelated work that needed to get done, so I gave my DRI role a two day suspension. The very next day was a weekend, and so I got right to work. Or at least I tried. I attempted to finish the DRI forms in one sitting, and ended up dazed and confused, as I had forgotten what a style element was. I seeked help from my teammates, but it was a Sunday, and they must have been deep in bible study. Seeing no success from the forms, I turned to editing the DI video. I also hit a brick wall there, as I figured out I either misplaced the necessary footage, or we just straight-up didn’t record it. Another wall I hit was with the editing. 

Looking back now, I must have been either A) sleep deprived, or B) fighting some sort of high-level anesthesia, because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to accomplish split-screen within iMovie. Left with no other options, I iMessaged Ms. Willemse. She told me to drop everything currently, and she would help us at school. At school the next day, she helped us/me with everything. If not for her, we probably would have failed DI. Seriously. We eventually figured out a solution to our work predicament, and we got our work done, and somehow managed to get all the necessary footage. And they all lived happily ever after, right? No. 

We still had an instant challenge to go through. The instant challenge accounted for exactly 25% of Destination Imagination. It might not seem like that big a number, but it could make a difference in where you rank. During this part of the post, I can’t say much about what the instant challenge was, or how my team did it, because there are some strict DI rules that don’t allow you to speak of the challenge for at least a few months. Talk about censorship. 

The one thing I can do is talk about how I think I did during the instant challenge, and I think my team and I did well, even though we were all nervous. 

Now, DI is mostly done. The movie has been filmed and edited, the Instant challenge has passed, the final model is built, and the DRI forms are ( mostly ) completed. Our team has been through a lot together, and we just might have grown as thinkers, and problem solvers. 

The last small things we do as a team is record our team Q & A video, which answers a bunch of questions made by our team, like “What are you most proud of?” Or “How did you build the model?”. Then after that, we made a short video of ourselves introducing our team. 

After all the hard work we had done, through all the blood sweat and tears, we finally made a video that met all the criteria, and that we thought worthy of entering into Destination Imagination. I know that when me and my team sat down and watched the video, we were all proud of ourselves for completing everything, and more importantly, for being able to not give up.

 Destination Imagination has been quite a journey. My expectations for it could not have been more wrong; whatever I thought would go wrong went well, and everything I thought would go right went wrong. I couldn’t believe the competition and the challenges were all made by a single group of people. I have never been involved in such a a large-scale competition, and the amount of participants gunning for victory is more than impressive. Destination Imagination has, so far, been my most interesting experience in the Performance Learning Program. 

DI Final Product

( Edit- Here’s my team’s Q&A video. It answers a few questions about the process of D.I. )

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