So recently in PLP we just competed in another edition of DI Regionals. DI being Destination Imagination, a competition where you have to solve some form of a challenge. You can read more about what DI is in some of my previous posts. I was apart of the engineering challenge. This required my team and I to create a structure that could withstand over 100 pounds of weight being dropped on it, we had to create an event depictor that would have an impact on the story, and 2 team choice elements. For our story, it just had to have a dramatic impact on someone.

My team was Adam, Michael, Ruby, Mimi, Claire, and I. We were named Tender Greens. Why? We don’t really know. It was the name of a restaurant we went to in California.

Proof ^

For our story, we decided to go more serious then we normally do for DI. Our storyline was based around a high school student who has social anxiety. We had a character as a physical representation of it. To integrate our structure into the story, we had the structure be a representation of the main characters shoulders, with the weights being the pressure. I played the main character’s brother. I was there to be supportive and to help her out at the end of the story. The other characters were a teacher who assigned her class a project, a nerd who was our main character’s partner, and for comical relief, we had the full of himself athlete.

For our event depictor, we had one of our group members create a podium. This would be used in all classroom scenes. The way we connected this to depicting the event is because it’s one of the reasons our character has a panic attack. As she freaks out in the middle of a presentation. The event depictor also played ominous music when ”anxiety” was dropping the weights. It was also what we mostly used to cover up the projector for our background, and 2nd team choice element.

For our team choice elements, we had Makeup Special effects and a phone call scene in our performance that was edited with special effects. For the makeup, we had Claire tattoo our athlete to make him look way more self-focused. She also gave my character a beard because it fit with the story of making me look older. She also gave ”anxiety” a smoky eye look, to make her look a bit more spooky and unnatural. I was the leader of the 2nd team choice element. We filmed to different videos of our characters talking on the phone about their project in front of a green screen, then I took the background out, replaced it, then merged the 2 videos together to make it flow nicely. If you want to just watch that scene by itself here it is.

Finally it was presentation day. Unfortunately the night before, I had just gotten a minor concussion in my hockey game, so I ended up missing our team’s instant challenge. However, I heard it went well and we got some good points from it. I was there for the team challenge though as I felt I couldn’t miss it. We got all checked in on time and didn’t have any problems with the structure. So we were good to go. Here is the video of our presentation.

Overall we did very well as we got 3rd place out of 7 teams. We did kind of run out of time at the end but it wasn’t too costly as there were only a few lines away from the end. We got a lot of weight on the structure but it definitely could’ve held more if we had more time. To end this post off, here are our raw scores and feedback from the appraisers.