Imagine a project that is six months long. You have expectations to do good, but you have six months, so you can leave it until the last month because it’s not THAT much work. Spoiler alert – It was. It was that much work. This is DI. I haven’t had any projects that last this long ever, so I left all the work to the last month. Bad idea.

What is DI

DI is an abbreviation for Destination Immagination – STEAM based challenges that students solve in teams. It is a global tournament for ages 3 to 21, and is really focused on teamwork and learning big important life skills. There are different categories for the tournament, the ones that my class had were science, technical, fine arts and improv. Each category had its own challenge, and you had to solve them in the form of a story. I was part of a group doing a challenge in fine arts.

About the challenge

The fine arts challenge required to create a story about a trickster in a tricky situation. We had to include a costume transformation and an illusion. We also had to add two things that we enjoy as hobbies as part of the story, so we picked a painter to be in one of our scenes, and we wrote a song. The painting was also the illusion. These are called team choice elements. We had to present this story in 8 minutes or less and have some decent backgrounds and props.

How did we do it

We had class time to work on pretty much whatever we wanted. We had to create a compelling script, a costume transformation that enhanced the story, an convincing illusion and think of our team choice elements. Staying focused and agreeing was a big challenge for our group. After we finished all the writing and planning we only had 2 months left. We were a little behind, but we met up a few times after school, and Makai and I made the song and the first backdrop. Jupiter made their guard costume. Things were looking up. Then spring break came. Makai came over a few times and we made progress on the second backdrop. Kai made their costume. The only problem is that DI was on the upcoming Saturday, and the illusion wasn’t done, we had a team sign to make and a costume transformation worth 30% of our points to make that we hadn’t even started. So in the last week leading up to DI we met up every day and worked. We added more dialogue in the intro, made the team sign, the costume transformation, the stand to hold the background and the second background with an improved illusion. In the end we have managed to get everything ready – just in time.

Cutout door

Some light paint, not convincing

Final product

These are the two backdrops

I made this contraption to hold the backdrops. In the play you will see how we did the scene changes, and I think it’s quite innovative. We had to find something cheap easy and reliable. The last two didn’t apply as we found out but it was really cheap.

The day of the competition

On the day of the competition Makai came to pick me up, we loaded up his minivan and we left. We picked up Jupiter who had their costume ready and was prepared. I had forgotten my lines completely due to the fear of forgetting them. Ironic. I was reading them as we drove, which didn’t do well with my vertigo and carsickness. I only had the intro, a song and an outro. I was not confident. The day before we were doing dress rehearsals and we were not the best. As we got there we realized how little time we had. Bringing the milk jug contraption of a stand was hard since it was to tall to carry inside. By the time we had everything in the prep room we only had five minutes. We taped the stand together and went to our presentation room. We had our costumes. We had the illusion. We had each other.

3, 2, 1 Action!

Thoughts on the project.

This was my first time doing DI, so I had no idea what I was in for. The lack of meeting up with my group is my biggest regret, because none of us worked much when we weren’t together. The groups that met up a lot had much more time to work, and you could tell. I liked DI, and would like to try the Improv category next year because in the instant challenge we were mostly doing improv anyway, and I liked it a lot. The team aspect was one of my favourite parts, because there is a lot of collaboration that can happen, and you get to know people that you would’ve never talked to otherwise. Another reason why I like the team setting is because you can brainstorm well, and all your ideas are heard and compared to the recast of the team. You learn what ideas are good and which are bad so that you get a collectively better result. DI is hard, and quite a learning experience, so I am excited for next year.

Thank you for reading.