Hello people of Earth, it is Jason, here again today to talk about the 2018 Winter Exhibition. This was a much anticipated event, and has proven, time and again, no matter how confident you feel about the exhibition, something always goes wrong (or not the way you hoped). This was the situation for us, as the exhibition proved to be a powerful foe, but fell to the might of sheer willpower (and complaining). This project revolved around storytelling, and bringing stories to life in an interactive experience.
So first, let’s talk groups. At first, we were divided into Chem Story pairs. I was paired with Kyle. In these groups, we made the infamous Chem Story Animations for science. I won’t talk too much about this as I already have a blog post for this.
However, in Humanities, it was a different story (subtle pun). We started in Humanities by reading a variety of stories, ranging in content from a spooky, scary, robotic nursery (The Veldt), a man eating river monster (The Sea Devil), And a possibly murderous hamster (Barney).
moreharmony / Pixabay
The point of these stories was to prepare us for our project: To bring our chemical story to life in an interactive experience. To accomplish this, we also attended an escape room.
Escape rooms. You know what they are. Rooms that are rigged up with clues and many, many, moving parts. The escape room establishment we attended was the SmartyPantz Vancouver. Our escape room was the “Morning Never Comes” room, described as “Disney creepy”. It certainly was. I’m legally not allowed to go into detail, but if you’re in the area, head over and give one of the rooms a try. You won’t regret it (unless you pick the scary cannibal one).
After our experiences and research, we merged groups, with our group consisting of myself, Kyle, Jordyn, Gabby, Fraser, and Luciano. For those veteran readers, this coincidentally formed the world-renowned Space Cows from DI.
We then slowly and painfully combined our stories, taking elements from all 3 and merging them into some abomination of death and destruction (just kidding). This is when things started to heat up. After the merging and several painful rewrites, we had a completed story. Fun.
Using our escape room knowledge and storytelling experiences, we pieced together the elements of our room, incorporating the audience interactions. We came up with a few ideas, such as a newspaper puzzle, a Rube Goldberg machine, and a good ol’ fake newscast (this one was especially impressive).
Our Story revolved around two gangs, the Halogens, and the Alkali (based on real periodic table “periods”). It involved two star-crossed lovers, rival gang leaders, and a brawl. Pretty much “West Side Story” with atoms.
We came up with the catchy name of “Atom City” as our title and soon, it was Exhibition day.
Little known fact: I spent most of my Winter Vacation having nightmares about the exhibition. It was that bad. We had 5 hours to throw together an impromptu escape room, and we got through it by the absolute SKIN of our teeth. Here are stats:
5 and 1/2 hours of hard work
3 Walls having to be covered completely with newspaper
Over 40 chairs and desks moved multiple times each
Several bags of food requiring to be bought
Take that into consideration, as well as the fact that we had 6 hours or less of sleep in the days leading up the the exhibition. However, we greatly bonded as a team during the whole construction process. We were able to throw together something that actually looked pretty good.
By some divine miracle, it all came together and the best part was, I got to wear a tux for the whole night. (And day.) After a quick dinner, we got to our rooms and the visitors began to trickle in. The food rations sustained, and so did my mental health after 2 hours of pretending to be a crime boss. That’s right, I wasn’t Jason Guan anymore, I was Christopher Chlorine, Halogen Crime Boss.
But of course, after construction comes clean-up (or deconstruction?). We spent quite a while restoring the classroom we used to exactly the way it was before. I’d like to think we did a pretty nice job. We were in and out, leaving only haunting memories.
The Exhibition didn’t really teach me anything new, just brushing up on skills I’d learned before. Nonetheless, it was good as I was able to brush up on my storytelling, my construction skills, and my chemistry. I enjoyed the exhibition, but it really drained my energy. I almost wanted to skip the next day of school to catch up on lost sleep, but it was the last day of school.
Alas, the actual presentation of the exhibition was a memorable and fun experience, and I have just as many positive memories about it as I do negative.
This is Jason Guan, signing off.