Well today is going to be a post dedicated to DI once again. This is my second year doing DI and this year I felt I had some very different experiences from last year. Within this post I am going to compare some events and also reflect on how I think this regional tournament went and what my team can improve on.

The first challenge I encountered was actually in the week that DI started, and it would be the challenge itself. Last year I was part of the fine arts challenge, in that challenge I had to build a set for my group and rehearse a skit. This year the challenge my group ( Javer , Anthony , Emily, Jude , and Rhiann ) chose was improve. For this years improve challenge it involved acting out a skit where a villain was creating a conundrum using a power, then a superhero had to save the day with an underwhelming power, to enhance the skit we would use sound effects made live on stage. Everything I just mentioned would be given to us the day we presented, which meant we could not plan for anything except for the villains power ( we could research possible powers). This was very tough for me because I was already used to building things from last year and that is what I prefer to do, and the other thing that I was not used to was a challenge because it was based completely around acting. Although there were these challenges, I found one thing that I could do well and could help my group with. It was the sound effects.

I had never made sound effects live for an audience while others were acting in a skit, but I thought it would be an interesting test of skill so I chose to spend most of my time doing this part. Finding the right sound effects can be very difficult, especially when these sound effects were for things like fire and flight. Sometimes sounds come directly to your head when you think of an action, so I tried to think of all those types of powers and then find objects that could make those sounds. Another tough part was making general sounds. These are sounds for things like “ when a person gets an idea”, in my head I hear a ‘ding’ sound, so when I wanted to make that sound I had to look for objects that make something that sounds like a ‘ding’.

The last step before presentation was practice, lot and lots of practice. At first this was more difficult for my team, but as time went on I think we started to become more used to acting with each other (except me because I did sound effects). Another thing that got better as we went on was sound effects and timing as well. We had to have cues to let me know when to play a sound and I think in the beginning it was tough because the actors had to act and cue the sound effects. I was very impressed with how fast they adapted to these situation and learned how to act and communicate.

The last event was of course the big regional tournament that was hosted at our own school which was very nice. We had our instant challenge an hour after we got to school. Personally I think it went really well, we all worked very well together to come up with ideas in a very short amount of time. Not only that but we also made our solution funny and show how our team worked together to complete the challenge. It was good to get that done right away because now we could focus on our upcoming challenge ( and other classmates challenges as well).

I think that ten minutes to our challenge is when some people started to get nervous which is natural but in the future calming ourselves before presentations definitely something that we should work on. Then it was the presentation. We received a weird conundrum but overall I think we were able to play it out quite well and found a solution that somewhat worked. 

Some downsides to our presentations are that we did not finish the skit in time, this made our performance kind of weird since the end was unknown. We also did not have as many sound effects as I would have liked there to be, there were some here and there but not enough to really impress the audience. To wrap it up I also think that we started out kind of nervous which caused us to drag the skit on instead of just skipping to important events that make the skit fill the criteria.

To conclude I think that this was an okay performance that left us with a lot to work on and practice. I know that my group wants to try more and more skits with sound effects but also cues to the sounds come in at the right moment. We would also like to practice getting to the main events in our skits so we don’t run out of time again. Even though things did not go according to plan I still am very happy with the effort that the team put into this skit, and I have high hopes for provincials.

That’s all for now.