As you may know, D.I is a competition that has students compete in different themed challenges. These students participate in regional, provincial, and (some go to) globals. However, as EVERYONE also knows, we’ve been given the coronavirus. This is a weird situation we find ourselves in.
The coronavirus has limited our ability to compete in the provincial tournament. Therefore, all the work that our teams have done has gone to waste. BUT WAIT! Our PLP (Performance Learning Program) has taken it upon itself to give the teams in our school a chance to do their performances anyway. These performances were done over a Zoom call, and tweaked it to work with the Zoom FaceTime restrictions.
Everything past this point happens after D.I regionals, so the link to that post is HERE
My team had a lot of work to do after the presentation at the D.I regionals. We had planned to fix our minecart that we’d built. We were also going to make some line changes to the script and totally remake our background. And, finally, we planned to make some changes to the bridge supports because the original design had the bridge bending / collapsing.
(Original Bridge Supports)
Before we could do this however, spring break came upon us. Little did we know, this would be the last time we’d be living our regular day-to-day lives.
After spring break, nobody knew what was going to happen in general. Everyone was in self isolation and schools were figuring out what to do with students sitting at home. Soon enough, our online classes started, and we were getting back into the rhythm of school work. With that came the idea of doing an online D.I tournament. When my team heard about the online tournament we were a little confused. Our challenge required us to act and build a bridge on stage — together! We didn’t know how we could create the bridge when 1) all of our supplies were at school and 2) only one person could build the bridge because we have to be socially distanced. So, we put together a plan where we could pull off our routine and bridge.
Here are the changes we made for our online class:
• We took advantage of the virtual background feature in Zoom and had two different images ready
• We had Brenton as our bridge builder (he had a bunch of cards left over)
• We changed some of Thomas’ lines and gave them to me (originally, I was away for the first D.I. tournament, so I needed to be included)
• We preformed without costumes
Background images:
(Cave Wall)
(Lost City)
The first image below is the bridge setup that we used during the regional tournament, and the online tournament.
The next picture is the bridge setup that we would’ve used for the provincials, if it hadn’t had been cancelled.
List of things we would’ve added include:
• New road supports
• New ground supports
• More duct tape around the cracks of the cards
There were other changes we knew we needed to make in the online presentation. In the regional D.I., we were not good with letting people talk, and people talked over each other. So, in planning for the online session, we talked over FaceTime to problem solve things like appointing Brenton to build the bridge because he had the supplies and researching cave / out city background images because our story took place in both places. A helpful way of solving some of our problems was assigning two to three people to do some research with the other two people left to make the decision. That strategy was something that saved us a lot of time that we would’ve wasted on decision making.
Transitioning, I think my team did well. We rehearsed multiple times before the actual performance, and the acting from my team was energized. They’d improved a lot since the last performance and there was a lot of emotion in their acting.
In the end we pulled everything together, and the whole act was fun. I’m very glad that we got to have another chance, and show what we’ve leaned.
Please visit my teams blogs:
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