It has almost become part of PLP every year. Almost like a constant, looming problem, looking just over our shoulders all year. I’m talking about Destination Imagination, or DI. I have been doing DI since grade 8, so this is my third year competing. This is also my third year in the engineering challenge. Wow, maybe I need a change. Anyway, my group of  Mimi, Michael, Claire, Ryan, and Ruby chose to do the engineering challenge this year, called Drop Zone. Our team was called tender greens for no real reason.

Last year I also did engineering, and the challenge was very similar, you can read about that below.

Destination Imagination Provincials 2

This year is different though, we had to create and present a story about a sudden event that has dramatic impact, build a structure, integrate structure testing into the story, design and create an event depicter that used technical methods to visibly or audibly depict the sudden event within the story, and more. So, yeah this year it’s a lot.

In Destination Imagination, when you a really scored you are scored on your story, your teamwork, and for us we were also judged on how our structure held the weight. The way that you can get a lot of points can be broken down into what you should show to the judges, and what you should say to the judges. You should show creativity, they love to see creativity and imagination in your performance and structure. The second is when you are asked to explain any part of your performance or structure, you have to talk up what you have to make it sound like more than what it is, this is called BSing. I don’t think that I need to explain what BS stands for. So, that was what we needed to do, and we knew that. We also knew that if you have a completely our of the box story idea, they will give you a ridiculous amount of points, so we based our performance around Mental Health, specifically social anxiety.

The idea of our story was to have one character, played by Claire, have social anxiety. This anxiety is kickstarted by pressure when talking to another character, Chad. Played by me. And then the pressure and story peak when Claire is forced to give a presentation alone in front of the class. At this point Ruby, who is playing Claire’s Anxiety, drops the weights on the structure. This is a representation of the pressure building on Claire’s shoulders. This isn’t the first interaction between Claire and Chad, with anxiety looming behind.

That is the general idea of the story, but if you remember I mentioned not that we need something called an event depictor. This is a technical element that helped add a dramatic impact to the story. We made a podium that Claire is presenting at, the podium was wired through an old radio, and had speakers built in that played ominous music when she is starting to have a panic attack. We started with this podium.

Then, I took it, wired it and installed the speakers. The podium also helped with one of our team choice elements, but I’ll talk about those later. But, this is Clare presenting at the finished podium.

Like I just mentioned, this podium also helped with one of our two team choice elements. These are two parts of our story that show our groups interests, skills, and talents. Our first one was a phone call animation, in the story this is when Claire is talking over the phone to her parter, Garret, played by Michael. This is the Animation that was shown. The second team choice element was my tattoos and Ryan’s beard. I’m quite frustrated we didn’t get a photo of them, we were in a huge ri she to go et the them doen, but you can clearly see my tattoos and Ryan’s bear in these photos.

I have showed some photos from our presentation, but I have not showed the whole thing. So you can watch the whole performance by Tender Greens Here.

So, that was all our regional tournament. In April 7, we have provincials. That is the real deal, in a way this tournament was kind of a warm up. We got scored and now we know what to fix to better our scores. These were our scores.

Even though we wound up coming thrid, we have a lot to work on, we got cut short in our performance, so we did not have time to show everything that we wanted to, so that definitely will be changed. Also, when Ruby was testing the structure, she had to wait to think and then say an insult. So, next time we will have her voice pre-recorded and playing through the podium, so that all she has to worry about is dropping the weights quickly.