DI 2: Improv Boogaloo

Destination Imagination has returned! It feels like such a long time since I did it last year, but the time finally came, so here is my reflection on the 2020 DI regionals! My experience this year was a lot different than last year, starting off with the challenge. Destination Imagination is split into different challenges, and last year I did the technical challenge, which usually involves making some kind of mechanism. This year, I ended up doing the improv challenge, where you have to act and come up with things as you go along, which is a lot different from what I did last year. I also had different group members from last year, my group members were Noah, Rhiann, Jude, Malaika, and Emily. I’m pretty much done talking about last year’s DI now, but if you want to read about it in depth you can read the post I did on it here. Back to the this year’s DI, this year’s improv challenge was pretty interesting, it was called To The Rescue and it was about superheroes. The skit we had to do had to have a villain who uses a superpower to cause a conundrum, and then the hero steps in with and saves the day with an underwhelming power. The villain’s power, the conundrum, and the hero’s underwhelming power are all randomly selected, which is the improv part. On top of all that, we also had to enhance our skit with sound effects. There were also few more minor details that are covered in DI’s official video on the challenge, which you can check out right here.

Our group started off by doing forms. Lots and lots of forms. They covered thing like which materials we could use to outlining the challenge requirements, but the really important ones were the ones that had to do with the elements of the challenge itself. Since the randomly selected villains power came from a pool of about ten or so powers, we had to research them so that we would know everything about whatever power was selected during the challenge. However, the conundrum and hero’s power are a different story, because while the villains power comes from a preselected pool, the conundrum and hero power can both be anything, which helps buy into the improv idea. To combat this, we came up with random powers and conundrums to use during our practice sessions, which I’ll get to in a bit. While they were a bit boring, all these forms helped us understand everything about the challenge, which gave us an advantage at the end, so I’m glad we did them. There was still a big part of the challenge we had to focus on before the tournament, and that was the sound effects. We were allowed to have a box with a bunch of objects in it as our sound effects, nothing electronic allowed. We were thinking of having different people make the sound effects during the performance, but eventually we decided to have one person do them for the whole skit, which was Noah. For the actual sound effects, right off the bat we started coming up with things that could make basic sounds, but in our early practice sessions we realized there were still lots of situations where Noah couldn’t really make a sound for. To minimize those situations, everyone had to come up with items that could make a sound corresponding to every villain superpower, and then bring them in for our sound keeper. The last big thing we did before the tournament was practice. We came up with random conundrums and heroes powers, and a random villain superpower from the pool. This way, we would never know what was coming and would have to go along with it, like we would have to in the actual challenge. After doing a lot of these random skits, we started to realize what we needed to improve on the most. There were a few minor things, like not talking over each other, and making sure you face the audience. These weren’t that hard to overcome, you just had to think about what was happening from your scene partner’s or the audience’s perspective. Then there were more major ones, like our lack of sound effects. While we had gathered all the sound making objects we needed, we didn’t really give Noah much time to put in sound effects, which could cost us a lot of points at the tournament. We started to practice giving really obvious cues so that Noah would have time to put in sound effects, and it took us a while to actually incorporate it into our skits, but we worked it out eventually. We also had a problem where we would drag out one thing because nobody knew what direction to take the skit, and then before we would know it our time limit was up. We decided we needed a narrator to give context to our scenes, and move the scene along if it started slowing down. That narrator ended up being me. It took some practice to get used to, but eventually I started to feel confident with my role and the ability of my team. We had started out pretty bad, but the practice had payed off and we had improved a great deal. We were going to need everything had learned though, because after all that time we spent practice the tournament was knocking on the door.

On the day of the tournament, we had our instant challenge before our actual challenge, which we did pretty good on it, giving us a needed boost of confidence. Then the time finally came, and we went in and did our performance that we had practiced on for so long. I think our challenge actually ended up being pretty good, because we got a bunch of sound effects in, we didn’t have any awkward pauses, and we managed it work with the challenge elements we were given. Not that it wasn’t without flaws, we ran out of time at the very end of our skit, although it didn’t ruin our skit because we were pretty much at the end anyways. Personally, I think I did my job as narrator, although I think I could’ve sped things up a bit in parts where it started to drag on. Despite the flaws, I still consider it a success, because now we have an even clearer idea of what we can improve on, and I also managed to demonstrate the Research and Understand competency. I feel that I demonstrated it when researching the challenge and practicing, for example when we were considering how our performance would look to the audience and judges, or when we were practicing to think from our fellow group members perspective so that we could play off of what they did better, or to give them opportunities to do actions or make sound effects.

Well that’s about it for this blog post, I’m sure we’ll improve a lot in the provincials, so stay tuned for that!