DI… On The Internet?

Hi there, and welcome to my post on the DI Provincials. If you haven’t seen my previous post on the DI Regionals, I highly recommend you read that first so that you know more about the challenge, and DI in general, but in a quick summary I was in the improv team with my fellow teammates Noah, Malaika, Jude, Emily, and Rhiann. We had just finished the regional tournament, which turned out all right, but it gave us a lot of ideas on what we could improve on for the upcoming provincial tournament. Except, there was one small problem. Now, you may have heard of a certain virus called Covid-19. Well, that virus just so happened to close down our school, R.I.P Destination Imagination 2020.

Except, our teachers refused to let Destination Imagination D-I (Ha…) and they came up with a novel solution, we could still do DI, but through the mystical power of the internet! However, this still posed a few problems for us, who were still getting used to the program we were using to communicate online. We didn’t have that much time before the online tournament, so it was up to us to meet on our own time and come up with solutions. The first major problem we decided to tackle was acting. How were we supposed to act on camera? Well, this one was actually fairly straightforward, we would just say lines normally in front of our cameras when we got a cue to do so. Except, that brings us to another one of the problems we had from the last tournament, our cues. Now, our cues were mediocre, but there was still lots of room to improve. To help combat this problem, we decided to use a narrator again, which was me, again. We did this so that I could give obvious cues and progress the story of things were taking too long. Obviously the problem isn’t fixed by simply having a narrator, so we did some practice runs together to help make sure we were catching on to and giving cues. However, this brings me to our final and possibly biggest problem: the sound effects. Now, if your remember from my last post, we had amassed a boxful of sound creating objects for our previous tournament, so it shouldn’t be a big deal, right? Well, we left all of it at school, which is current closed, which leaves our sound keeper Noah without a way to actually fulfill his role. We ended up doing a sort of mini version of what we did to come up with sound effects at the beginning of DI, and eventually Noah had found enough things that he could work with. We did some practice with our cues and all the new sound effects, and we were actually looking pretty good! I thought we had overcome all the obstacles that had come our way, but I was wrong, because I had forgotten the biggest challenge yet, which was the presentation itself.

The online event was scheduled like an actual DI tournament, with a spreadsheet that had all the presenting times, and even an instant challenge. Eventually, it was our time to present, and it was time for all of that practice to pay off. I was actually pretty nervous at first, but all things considered, it went pretty smoothly, and everyone preformed well, just like we had practiced. The instant challenge also happened to be a performance challenge, and we did pretty well on that as well. In fact, after all that, I feel that I went from developing to accomplished in my Research and Understand competency, because we had to look at the challenge from a completely new perspective to solve our problems and come out on top. In conclusion, I think we greatly improved even due to the new challenges we faced, and that I managed to meet the competency for this project. That’s about it for this blog post, make sure to stay tuned for more!