This year’s DI performance was, well, a disaster.
Bit of a rough first sentence, hey? In any case, this is episode 3 of Destination Imagination. For this blog post I’ll being showing you the journey I took with my group to from the start to our regional performance.
If you don’t know what DI is, I highly suggest checking out my DI post from last year. It provides a full rundown on what it’s all about.
For this year in DI there were 5 different challenges. To determine our groups, we picked 5 people who we thought we’d work well with on a DI team. I can’t remember who exactly I picked but in any case I was put with Emerson, Kiera, Taylor and Anika.
Our group decided pretty quickly that we would take on the challenge of monster effects, which was an engineering task. Luckily for us, no other group chose to do that challenge and we were off and running!
Our challenge was pretty interesting. There were lots of small rules and complications that would take a while to explain so here’s the gist of it: we had to create a play in which a monster has a sudden effect to the story. Along the way, we have to create a structure and place weights on top of that, all the while still performing our story around that. If that’s confusing, check out this really cheesy video meant for 9 year olds!
To start off, we had to come up with a team name. We were all blanking until Ms. Willemse said we had 30 seconds left to pick. That’s when I came up with the brilliant team name of K-NEAT. The name uses the first letter of all of our team members in the group. Pretty ingenious, right.
Then came the work. Any DI participant knows DI always starts off slow, but more and more steadily picks up the pace and then the week before the performance is one big mess filled with lots of stress, running around, screaming at team members and just general panic.
We started off slow and steady. My group was using an app where we can assign each other to-do’s and at the start it seemed like we had a mountain of to-do’s to get through. It seemed like a lot compared to my challenge last year where all we had to do was put on a play.
As it so happens, I was in tasked with writing our story (along with Kiera). It was an interesting task because lots of points are given out for the creativity of the story. We were trying to make it as creative as possible. Then, a member of our group suggested that it be a love story. This was great thinking because in most stories, the monster is big and scary and ferocious, but what if the the main character fell in love with the monster? Similar to beauty and the beast? Boom. That had to be worth some points right there. It stands out from the rest of the stories.
Once we had set our storyline, we had to create props to enhance our story. Our tale was going to be set on a desolate volcanic island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. So, of course we needed to have a volcano prop! Kiera took one for the team and created a really awesome looking volcano. I created a frame for the backdrop and Anika and Taylor hand-made our backdrop out of paper alone. It was all coming along nicely.
Then, we had to get to the nitty-great difficult part of our challenge.
The structure was one difficult part. It was fairly difficult to come up with a concrete idea for our structure in terms of what it would look like, how we would get the supplies, who was able to cut it. In the end we figured out a fairly basic solution which was inspired by a team who did the same challenge last year. For our structure we used wood (I forget which type), gorilla glue and popsicle sticks. Here’s a picture!
Then we had to figure out a special effect. This portion gave our team the most trouble. Our idea was to hide a fan under our volcano prop and then somehow trigger the fan which would send tissue paper flying. This would happen when the monster (played by Kiera) confronts the main character ( played by myself). Our team thought we had it figured out and it was rolling smooth in dress rehearsals, but unfortunately we overlooked a rule that luckily Ms. Willemse caught on the day before our performance. This led to a mad scramble trying to figure out a way to automatically trigger it that stayed within the confines of the rules.
We thought all was well when we left the school the nigh before the big day. No one really knew the crazy turn of events that was about to unfold.
A lot of things went wrong for us on that day. Let’s debrief.
1. The forms debacle: When we went to check in for our performance, our group was missing some necessary forms that we needed to complete! That led to Kiera and I scrambling around handwriting the forms messily. Not very professional..
2. The bill of materials: Each group is required to present a small sample of each material they used when creating their structure. The night before, we had everything organized and then when we got there, our gorilla glue had gone AWOL! It was no where to be found. However, it wasn’t the biggest disaster and it only resulted in us losing 10 points
3. Special effect: Our group got to the school well before we had to in order to perform some last second checkups on our special effect. To our horror, our battery we used in our circuit had died! Try as we might, we couldn’t find a replacement and we couldn’t get it to work. We decided to trigger it automatically, losing another 10 points for that. When we did trigger it, we had forgotten to set the tissue paper up correctly and it lacked the theatrical effect we desired.
4. The weight dropping debacle: one person from our group had to drop weights on our structure which would earn us points. Unfortunately, it meant that they couldn’t say their lines while they were doing that. It resulted in a huge improv act between Anika and I to make the story work.
There were a few other small mistakes, but apart from those I thought it was alright. Check out our vaillant attempt:
To be honest, I haven’t even looked at the video since it happened.
Let’s take some positives. Our group now has a crystal clear idea on what we can improve for our provincial performance. It’s going to be easy to improve on the regionals which makes us look better as a team.
Also, we scraped a second place out of all that! Granted, there were only 3 teams, but second is second.
We also won our instant challenge, which proves our team can work together really well in pressure situations.
I’m proud of my group and how we handled the last minute problems. It should be a goal of ours to be more organized for our provincial performance.
That wraps up my summary of part 1 of DI this year. I’ll let you know how provincials go shortly!
thanks for reading,
Nik
