I’m sure that you have heard about DI by now, if not you can catch up here. Basically, at regionals, we got second which means that we can go to provincials. Usually, by the time provincials come around you haven’t changed much about your project, but for us, we had to scrap the whole thing because we lost two out of five teammates. And as you might know, we were the visual arts, which is the one where you need to create a story and a disappearing act. So like I was saying before we had to redo everything and even the disappearing act because last time the judges said that it was an appearing act and not a vanishing one. Anyways we had a very long revision process and a lot of things to do before provincials.

We first prioritized and redid our script. Lots of people told us to simplify everything because before our script was soooo confusing. We started off by figuring which ideas we wanted to keep and which ones we wanted to get rid of. This narrowed down the story a lot and it simplifies it. Once that was finished we narrowed the characters down and changed the storyline so that we could cut out some confusing parts. Here’s our first then the second draft of our script:

Once everything was completely simplified we had to come up with a different disappearing act, one of our teammates came up with the idea of using some type of thermal paint. We painted a piece of cardboard with the thermal paint and decided to incorporate it into a scene at the very beginning where the disappearing colour runs away, I’ll insert a clip at the bottom so that you can understand it more!

Another thing we needed to create was the fingerprint scanner which is in the interrogation scene, so they could figure out who was part of the disappearance of yellow (I know it sounds confusing right now, but if you watch the clips you’ll understand) anyway, we needed to create a representation of some sort of scanner that could reveal the true colour of our character, so once again we used the thermal paint. We painted the scanner all black then used the thermal paint just in the centre. Once the paint dried it turned kind of a greenish colour and when the thermal heat was pressed against it like a hand or finger or something, it would turn green. We made this paint with some thermal black to white powder, then we learned that if you mixed a different colour like yellow with the powder it would turn from black to whatever colour you added. After learning that we mixed yellow paint with the powder then some gloss and painted it on whatever we wanted.

There were only a few days left until provincials, so all that was left was to practice, practice, practice! These last few days were very stressful because it always felt like we were forgetting something or there was something we could be doing. I think the whole process went by very quickly, but we made the most out of the time we had.

The day of provincials we got there at around 8 am then as usually, we went to the parade where you show off your team poster. Then right after we had to head straight to our instant challenge, I would talk about the actual challenge but we aren’t actually allowed to talk about anything until the end of march, but overall I feel we did a pretty good and I felt we worked really well together as a team. Our overall score for just the instant challenge was 73/90 which is actually pretty good! Our presentation was actually at 2 so we had a while to just relax, we went down to the presentation room at around 1:30 to prepare for the challenge! Before the challenge, I was really really nervous, but I think overall we did a pretty good job compared to last time. Unfortunately, in the end, our disappearing act didn’t work because the thermal paint wasn’t exposed to the heat for long enough, but overall it was a really fun day!
Here’s the video of us presenting at provincials:

I think we learned a lot and improved from the first time, we learned that not everything has to be so complicated and that sometimes things can be as simple as possible. Provincials was a really fun experience and really different from last year. I thought that throughout the whole project there were many challenges like trying to integrate a disappearing act into the script and trying to get everybody to contribute. But I really enjoyed everything, and can’t wait for next year