Hello readers, and welcome back to my blog. 

Today’s post is about the recent project that I’ve completed in Maker 9, called Destination Imagination. This project follows the creative process, and it requires hard work. Each team is a assigned a challenge. In my case, I got the Fine Arts challenge, “Tricky Tales”. This challenge was all about a Trickster, an Illusion, and a costume transformation. My group members were https://www.blog44.ca/inesm/, https://www.blog44.ca/mateok/, https://www.blog44.ca/cooperk/, and https://www.blog44.ca/dylans/. Our group name was “The Coin did it for us”.

     

The first task was a test that evaluated our initial knowledge of the challenge. I didn’t do all that well in the test, but I eventually learned all the aspects of the challenge really well. 

The next step was to determine the details of our challenge and also assign roles.

Here’s the roles that we assigned:

 

I was the “DRI” in our group, so I made sure that everyone was on task, and fulfilling their roles. 

Here’s the different aspects that were required for our performance:

The next step was to start building our challenge. It was difficult at first for us to brainstorm ideas. At first, our idea was about a rich hotel owner that was a bad guy, and his decisions would soon come back to get him. However, we made our story about a medieval king that gambled away a sacred coin. This sacred coin kept the peacefulness and serenity of the town, so when it was gambled away, the town of gregoria fell into a famine. (I don’t wanna spoil too much). (You can watch the video at the start of the post).

The script took lots of work to make. It took me and my partner Mateo 6 hours to write it!

And I wrote it during my vacation in whistler.

Anyways, we read through the script in-front of the teachers. And they had one big question.. “Where’s your stuff??”. Meaning our set, costume illusion etc. 

So the next step began, building. The building would end up to be the hardest part of this project.I was in charge of building the set, and I did a bit of the painting too.

Mateo had the idea to put our 2 sets on a dolly. So that it could be turned easily and quickly.

Here’s a video of our completed set in action. IMG_2284

 

The first set is the town setting/castle entrance. And the second is inside the castle. 

The structure is made of wood, connected to the dolly with zip ties, and I used a hockey stick for extra support on the sides. My group and I spent lots of time in and out of school to build stuff and paint the set. 

We then did our second dress rehearsal, but it didn’t go so well. Since we hadn’t had the opportunity to practice transitions. We then spent the time to make those transitions smooth.

Then it was spring break, we used the break to memorize our lines and get familiar with the performance. I had the main role of “Radcliffe”, so I had lots of lines, (and a song).

When we got back from the break, everybody seemed nervous for the Tournament. We used the last bits of class time we had to practice as much as possible. 

The day of the tournament we were all really nervous and scared. We had spent months to prepare for this, so it was a pretty big moment. 

After our performance, we felt pretty good getting it over with, but we still had the Instant Challenge. (Unfortunately, I can’t discuss the details of the instant challenge with you guys). But I can say that we did pretty well, however our performance got halted by the 2 minute timer. As we ran it on too long.

Here’s a picture of the feedback we got from the appraisers for our MAIN challenge:

They didn’t tell us our placement at the tournament, however they will tell us soon. I’ll make sure to post how we placed. 

In conclusion, this project was just as tough as I expected it to be. With the tough deadlines, constant revising, group members not getting along, and just building our presentation. Nevertheless, it feels good to be done this project. One thing this project teaches me is that this is what the real world is like. Tough group work is something that I’ll for sure see in my adult life. Also, constant revising and refinement, and getting critique from others.