As most of you all ready know, one of the things we do in PLP is Destination Imagination. If you are just checking out my blog right now and you dont know what destination Imagination is you can check out the link here. Anyways, this year there was a slight twist to it. Our school, Seycove Secondary would be the school to host the regional championship! This meant that over 50 schools would be competing for first place in the lower mainland right at my very own high school! But lets start from the beginning, our class knew we were doing D.I. Again this year which gave us time to think ahead (Thinking what challenge they wanted to participate in etc.) This story picks up in January 2018 after our winter break. First Ms. Willimse gave us a google form to fill out. We could list one person we thought we would work well with and one person we thought we wouldn’t work well with. We could also list which challenge we wanted to do. This year we could choose between four different challenges, Maze craze (which is the technical challenge where you have to create a maze traveler that would navigate a maze), Unlikely attraction (which is the science challenge), Drop zone (which is the engineering challenge were you are supposed to make a structure that would be able to hold a certain amount of weight), and Change of Tune (where you need to sing and dance). I chose Maze Craze because it seemed the most unique and interesting, I thought that it would be the most fun and cool to carry out. after everyone sent their google docs in we were put into our groups. I got what I wanted and ended up in the Maze Craze group with Kiefer, Emily, Kai, and Jamie. The first thing our group needed to do was to read the info about our challenge, there was a large form that was put in iTunes U that would contain all of the stuff each group would need to know for each challenge, everyone needed to memorize the key things we needed to include in our performance so that we could do a really good job.

After our team went through the form we started to work on our story for our presentation, We wanted our story to include some history of canada, We wanted an important subject to be the basis of our story instead of making it some fairytale. One of our team members Emily is really into Norse culture and Vikings and that sort of stuff so we thought that it would be cool to include some of that art in our presentation and use the art as one of our team choice element’s. After we had figured out the theme/style of our performance we needed to figure out the little details, like what our maze traveler would be and how it would retrieve the object from the maze. We also agreed for me to make my own music for background music/sound effects so we could use it as our other team choice element. We also needed to write our script. Since we had a lot of stuff to do at once we all split up and worked on the tasks we needed to get done. I worked on the music and sound effects while Emily worked on the script with Kai, Jamie and Kiefer started work on the maze traveler.

Once Emily had finished the first draft of the script we could start to work on key things to the story like backdrops, costumes, effects, and figuring out everyone’s roles in the story. I started to paint the backdrop for the ice world while Jamie helped painting the backdrop for Newfoundland with Emily. We had also come up with a reasonable and easy concept for the maze traveler, we chose to make the maze traveler an RC car with a magnet on the bottom that could retrieve our object from the maze by just using magnetic force, easy, simple, time saving, but we all knew that we wouldn’t get many points for it since it isn’t a very creative way of going about our challenge. Since we knew we wouldn’t get a very good score for the maze traveller we had to make up for it in other areas. We decided to focus most of our attention on refining the script (because it was too long to fit in the 7 minute time limit of our performance), and making the performance very aesthetically pleasing, ex. Very neat and pretty backdrops, Good acting and story, and Good and interesting costumes. The regionals was closing in fast and we hadn’t finished everything, We still had too long of a script, Our costumes didn’t always work and were not very reliable, and we still hadn’t memorized our lines so on the day before regionals we stayed at school until 8:30 (12 hours in total) memorizing our lines, doing run through’s of the performance, and fixing props and costumes. At the very end of the night we were finally ready and we knew in the end that our performance was going to be great.

The day had finally come. The regionals tournament had arrived, On a Saturday. We all woke up at 8 am to come to the school to prepare for our performance. The school was packed! The most amount of people I have ever seen in our school, and most of them were in elementary school. Our performance time had finally come, at 10:00 am we were going to perform. And we absolutely killed it! Not everyone remembered their lines but everything ended up going super smoothly in the end. Our maze traveller retrieved the object from the maze with ease and we ended up getting first place! Even thought there were only two teams competing (including ours) it still counts as a win and our team is hopeful we will win again in provincials!

Once of the things I can come alway with from this experience is Ms. Willimse teaching us about our performance and our lines, sometimes you just need to wing it and go with the flow, your don’t need to know every little detail, just the big chunks so that you can make your performance sound more natural and become better actors, I will definitely be utilizing this tactic for provincials!