Chances are if you’ve read quite a few of these blog posts or have talked to me in person you’ve most likely heard of destination imagination, or what I call DI. DI is made up of a set of different challenges that teams solve. They then present their solution to appraisers, similar to judges, on the day of competition. There are 3 different levels that teams earn their way to compete at, those levels are regionals, provincials, and globals. If you want to get a bit more of an understanding you can go to their website or you can check out one of my posts from last year.

So you’re probably thinking wow this seems super cool, which it is, but there is a lot of work that has to get done and that makes for some very stressful class times. This is year I was in a group with Aedan, Amelia, Gabby, and Luciano. Our challenge was the improv one, which I have to say I was really excited about. In the improv challenge we spend our class times researching 10 of the figure heads from coins that they had selected. On the day of competition, two of these figure heads would be pulled and we’d have to improvise a skit with them as the main characters in either comedy or tragedy. However, there was way more to it than just that. The tale of our story would be given to us right before we started, and we had to include this thing called the flip. The flip was a piece of paper with something written on it that would dramatically change plans in the story. Also once the flip was turned over we had to go from verbal to non-verbal and switch genres.

The way my team went at solving this was to give each person two characters to research and make a character out of, this way whichever characters were pulled there would be someone who knew the character so well. We also each had a backup in two characters that were pulled were both one person’s. This strategy went really well for the most part. However, some of the figure heads we had chosen we had trouble finding information on and so then making a character out of them was hard.

From that hat point on it was just practice, practice, practice. We all needed to work on non-verbal acting, not laughing during the skit, and staying in character. This meant we did a lot of rehearsals with random flips and tales. One time we even played charades to work on non-verbal acting. We quickly got better and better and each skit we did was better than the last. We started feeling really prepared for the competition.

Finally the day of regionals came. Our team name, Common Cents, was displayed on our amazing sign made by Amelia, and we were ready to go. One thing I didn’t mention about DI is this thing called the instant challenge. The instant challenge is basically a mini task that you have to solve in a very small amount of time. There are tons of different ones and unfortunately I can’t talk about ours until globals is finished, however, I can say that my team felt pretty confident with what we did. Anyways, after opening ceremonies and doing our instant challenge it was go time. Below is a video of our whole challenge.

Overall I’m pretty proud of what we did. Merlion was one of those characters we felt kind of unprepared for and i think we did alright with it. Some areas we could definitely improve on is making sure the figure heads are the centre of attention. We also could’ve turned the flip over earlier then giving us more time to do an ending. Lastly I think a big thing to work on for provincials is to make sure we’re inside this square more. The whole time the narrator is talking nothing is happening in the background. So when the narrator talks instead of leaving the background empty we could be non-verbal acting so there still something interesting to look at. So that pretty much sums up how my team did in regionals this year. Now it’s time to get to work and rehearse even more for provincials.