We’re back at it again. Last week, the Destination Imagination Regional tournament took place at Seycove, and for the second year in a row, I was part of it.
Now that last year’s grade 10’s are now in grade 11, us grade 10’s were now the oldest group doing DI, and we would be l be working with the grade 9s. The teams weren’t the only thing that was new, because apparently DI doesn’t just do the same challenges every year. By late December, we had our team forms filled out, and a few weeks after we got back from spring break, we met our team.
This year, I was working with two other grade 10s, Neko and Baz, and 3 grade 9s, Brooklyn, Ella, and Maggie. After getting to know each other, and filling out the team contract, we could start working. I wanted to make sure this year DI went better than last year, so one of the first things I did was make a shared craft doc to act as a central planning hub. This was because last year, sharing files, and making sure everyone had access to information was a struggle, so I made sure to create a space to help with that, and explain it to everyone early. [^1]
As you can see from the screenshot, there was a lot of stuff we needed to get done. Although everything just got sort of muddled up together, I’ll bundle it up into nice pretty categories, for the narrative. Here:
* Concept
* Story
* Actual physical items
I had the heaviest hand in the story and planning this year so that’s what I’ll focus on here, I did help with some props but thankfully my team actually had a somewhat even division of work, although there were definitely some things we were missing. More on that later. One thing that was a bit harder ( at least in my opinion ) was actually coming up with the base idea for our story. For our challenge, the basic idea was that we needed a story about one or more people on a /real non-earth/ /planet/ who /think/ they are alone but discover they aren’t. We spent a while trying to figure out how the base details, but we did eventually settle on mars as a planet, and from there things started to click into place. This took a while to get all sorted out [^2], but we eventually had a good enough base to start making props, backdrops, and of course the story.
We knew from the beginning that the story might be tricky, because even though we had 6 people on our team, only 5 would be at the regional tournament, and for the upcoming provincials, there will be 4. This is because Neko was going on a trip right before provincials, and both Neko and I were going on the band trip, which will be right before regionals. With this in mind, we knew we would have to make sure we didn’t have the story need too many characters, and that we could cut one character out. We eventually figured out a “cast” that would work for the first, and decided we would just merge two characters for the second. [ ^3]
The script took way too long to write, as we were still fleshing out story details as it was made, which meant things often had to be changed. By the end, the script was about twice the length we needed, so we had to trim it down a fair bit, removing a whole section of “Mission control” lines.
While I had been writing, the other members of my group had been working on making props and backdrops, making hats, and choreographing the dance, [^4] and everything was coming together in good time for the tourney. One thing that wasn’t coming together quite fast enough was our actual performance, so coming up to the day of the tournament, we had only practiced fully three or four times ( and one of them was the dress rehearsal )
That meant that by the time DI came around we had ( almost ) all the stuff we needed, but didn’t really have the performance down. Luckily, our performance was fairly late in the day, so we got to spend a good few hours practicing, and we got everything running smoothly, maybe too smoothly in fact. We ended up being almost two minutes too short on the performance, which was something that hadn’t happened in any of our rehearsals, stress does crazy things, eh?
As for the rest of the performance, it all went pretty well, but I’d say there were some pretty clear areas for improvement. First was our Technobabble depictor. We were pretty confused about what this was, and while we wrote technobabble into the story, we never actually made a proper depictor. This is a /very/ clear path of improvement for provincials, as even if it’s only 50% on all related categories, it’s still close to 30 points we can gain. Second area for growth is our Scientific Demonstration. Again, this was written into the script, but the actual theatrics and function of the demonstration were lacking, considering it was just a slightly modified fan with streamers on top. I think with a bit more of a polished and impactful demonstration, there’s another easy 10-20 points we can get.
Anyways, that’s most of what happened this time, and what needs to change for next time. I think our team has all the elements for a winning solution, we just need to stop using tape and start using glue to hold everything together ( metaphorically speaking )
That’s all for this post, I’m Finn Hofbauer, So long for now.
- Why craft over basecamp? Well, craft actually works better for collaboration with smaller groups, and it’s just an overall nicer experience IMO.
- I’m not too sure why, but one theory I have is that everyone the same general concept of the story everyone’s individual ideas were different, which is in theory good, but in practice a bit of a hassle to coordinate.
- We also managed to find a way to keep Neko in the performance, with some prerecorded lines of “ship computer dialogue”.
- Our two team choice elements were crochet alien hats ( as part of the alien costumes ) and a dance, for the finale of our solution.