Let’s get Goghing!

So that time has come where Destination Imagination will strike fear into the hearts of those terrified of performing infront of others (like myself). So who’s nervous?

If you’ve been reading my blogs for a while, a while being 2 whole years, wow 2 years that’s terrifying to think of anyway long time readers would know what destination imagination is, but I’ll go over a recap for those of you who need to learn. DI, or destination imagination, is a worldwide organization that hosts annual events for children of all age groups to come together with friends and learn skills that can be actually used and applied in the real world, such as creative or innovative thinking (shout out to the crazy ones). I could go on explaining what this event is but the lovely team at DI have made a video explaining what exactly goes down so here it is.

Now in DI there are different categories for each team to perform in, this year our options were Scientific, Engineering, Technical and finally my choice Fine Arts. I’m going to try to explain the Fine Arts challenge but if you interested in finding out about any of the other challenges, or really just anything DI related, I recommend you visit their website right here.

Destination Imagination

So my challenge is Fine Arts, the name of the challenge “In Motion” we were tasked to make a performance based around three things a piece of visual art, a kinetic art piece and a piece of reimagined art. These things are a piece of artwork that’s publicly known (visual art), a piece of art that has some form of movement via a mechanism (kinetic art) and the original visual art being transformed into one of these new art forms, Dance, Illusion, Puppetry, Music, Pantomime or a Spoken Word Poem. So in short we had to make a story based around these three things, but wait there’s more we had to include 2 extra things known as team choice elements. Essentially these are things that make our performance unique and different to others. Team choice elements can be anything decided by your team that everyone relates too. But in order to choose team choice elements, we needed a team. My group consisted of 3 wonderful grade 9’s called Charlie, Aiya and Melissa, but there was also my grade 10 buddy Kira (you can click on their names to see their blogs). Now I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed to disclose what my team did for these exactly because we don’t want anyone stealing our ideas (that’s right DI is still not over) but I can assure you we came up with a solution we all agreed on. Now this may all seem like a lot, but I haven’t even gotten into any of the specifics yet, so if your interested you can find the document of rules on the DI website.

So now we knew what we had to do and just had to get down to it. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot I can say about the process of coming up with our solution, but what I can tell you is that it was stressful, I may have lost time from my lifespan, it was difficult and finally [suspenful pause] my team chose the art piece a Starry Night.

With this choice we came up with the name “The Gogh Getters”. Here is my groups version made by Aiya, along with some other photos of the creation process.

Now after I wrote the script and my group working hard to get everything done in the limited class time given and hours after school it was time, the week of DI had come. But here is the twist. The week before my lovely mother had gotten sick. I tried my best to keep my distance but on Tuesday I felt something going on with my throat, I immediately let my group know but I still hoped it was just a one day thing. But when I woke up the next day…. It had gotten worse. I decided it would be better for me to stay home and go get tested for something that had been going around. My results came back and well…. I had tested positive for strep throat. I felt so bad especially since I am one of the 2 main characters. I spent hours working on the script and I didn’t even get to perform it or see my friends act out scenes I had made. I am so thankful that my team reacted how they did and they are all so amazing. I’m so proud of them for doing as well as they did and learning new lines in such a short time. So now that this information is out there it’s time to see how my group did. Here is the video of their performance.

I’m really proud of my team for doing as well as they did without me and I’ll be sure to be there next time at provincials. 

So now comes the part of the blog where I usually reflect on the driving question, however there isn’t one this time so I’m just going to look back on a few things. Firstly I think we could have improved by… well… you know…. Having the whole team there but we could have also communicated slightly more as a groups so we didn’t have to cram so much into the last week. But I think compared to most of the groups my team did really well with setting times for things to get done. I also think we worked really well together despite most of us being introduced to eachother for the first time in this process. But in terms of personal reflection, honestly I expected to hate every second of DI, but through this journey I learned a few things about myself like before I didn’t know this but I’m actually a pretty good script writer and it’s actually quite enjoyable. I also learned that I am more capable than I thought and I can get things done in a shorter time than I think if I try my best and put my mind to it.

With that I’m going to wrap up this blog post with one question for you.

Do you think we can win Provincials?

Actually I’ll wrap up with an answer for you

Yes we can.

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