Yello! If you remember from last year we did something called DI. DI is a teamwork-based learning experience that involves challenges, forms, and a tournament. It’s also the bane of my existence. This year was just like last year, not the best, but it was a bit more fun than last year.

To start off we were given a form to put down which categories we wanted to be in. There are lots of categories for DI but this year we only got the choice to partake in Technical, Fine Arts, Scientific, or Improv. I got the one I wanted which was fine arts! In addition to our performance, we must also partake in an “Instant Challenge”. Instant Challenges are performance-based, task-based, or a combination of the two. Although each Instant Challenge has different requirements, They are also extremely confidential so this will be the last time you hear about an instant challenge.

After this, we were given our DI groups. My group consisted of Me, Max, Mateo, Cooper, and Dylan. Our challenge was to create a story about a trickster and a tricky situation. It also needed to have a costume change, but we’ll get to that later. After we had our groups we were given the challenge requirements document. Once we had that we needed to annotate the document we did this by highlighting things in different colours, circles, and underlying things. This is probably my favourite part of DI!

Next, our group members decided on a name! This took some time but after a ton of compromise – Mainly from Mateo (he wanted to name the group “Tactical Pterodactyls”)  we finally settled on the name “The Coin did it For Us”!!! Next, we started planning out what our skit would actually look like – We created a script over the break but ended up scrapping it and replacing it with our new script, which by the way has been through a tremendous amount of editing. In the end, we ended up with a story about a teen named Radcliffe – Radcliffe has to find a sacred coin that keeps his town up and running.

Once everyone had their roles, we started working on things like Sets, costumes, and props. I was in charge of sets! I started off by sketching an idea out in Procreate and then used that as a reference for my final sketch on paper. Then we painted! This consisted of a few laughs, me wearing my hoodie as a smock-thingy, and scrambling to get our hands on whatever paint was left. It was actually very fun!

As soon as the sets dried we put them onto our amazing rolly cart (Courtesy of Max!!) that helped us do our set changes! After this, we were able to start practicing our skit. This stage consisted of staying after school and early mornings as well as editing the script and trying to fit it all within the time limit!

After everything was done we finally got to present! To do this I sacrificed my Saturday and went on the oh so difficult journey to St. Jhons, a private school in the middle of nowhere (I’m deeeeefinitely not exaggerating here) where we presented our skit in front of a group of people with silly hats. After that, we did our instant challenge, which is confidential information so no one will be hearing about that. But here’s our performance!

In the end, we came 3rd out of all the fine arts teams in PLP! Although it is just their way of saying we lost … but think win-win I guess. But the judges did give us some feedback so here’s that:

 

Anywho, Thanks for reading!

Ines.