Hello world, I guess. I’m back with another blog post!

This post is all about Destination Imagination.  My team and I suffered for 5 months to bring you this post, so I hope you enjoy!

Right now, you’re probably beginning to wonder what the heck this “DI” thing is anyways. Fear not, fellow readers, for I am will explain this for you. Destination Imagination is a challenge, of sorts. This challenge is supposed to bring out the creative side of us and we should all use our imagination to solve this challenge, hence the name. This year for DI, there were five central challenges. They were technical, scientific, improvisational, engineering and fine arts.

In class we watched a short preview of each challenge to see which ones appealed to us. I chose to do the fine arts challenge and was put in a group with Lucy, Paisley and Izzy.

Watch the short video above to get a good idea of our challenge!!

If you didn’t watch the video above, here’s the gist of it. We had to create a musical that had to have two acts in it. We had to have at least one song per act. Between the two acts, there has to be a set change.

It was hard to get ideas for this challenge. At first, Ms. Maxwell gave us a chart with 16 squares in it. It was supposed to be an idea generation chart and I think our team benefited greatly from this. After, we had tons of ideas. It was hard after that though because we had too many ideas. Eventually, we came up with some concrete ideas.

What we wanted to do was have three characters stuck in a desert island. They had somehow fallen of a cruise ship and they were disappointed that they had to spend the rest of their life there. Then, they were miraculously saved by one of the characters. This whole segment was narrated by Lucy.

Keep in mind, this was still very early on. We still didn’t have any clue what we were going to do for a spectacle or a interesting set change.

At this point, it was kind of frustrating because all our ideas were clashing and we couldn’t agree on anything. I think the turning point for the disagreeing was one of the instant challenges we did in class.

Instant challenges are a huge point of DI. They are sort of like mini challenges in which you have to complete a task in order to get points. There are three types of instant challenge, task-based, performance-based or a combination of the two. During these challenges, you get points for teamwork, creativity and how well you complete the challenge. These tasks usually take about five minutes, but you can get lots of points for them. We were doing a instant challenge in class to get practice for them.

To get back to the story, we had to do one in class. During this challenge, we had a huge disagreement about how we should do the challenge and we lost major points towards teamwork. After the challenge finished, we went into the hall and it got quite heated.

To be honest, this taught us a good lesson. We had a mutual agreement after this to respect each other’s ideas and to work better as a team. In hindsight, it was probably a good thing this happened. After this, we rocked every instant challenge in class.

Our challenge was coming together nicely after this. We decided on the songs we were going to sing, a cover of Stay by Rihanna and also a cover of I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor. We tweaked our lyrics to make them work for our play. Here’s a picture of the lyrics!

Izzy helped by playing piano chords to make it more authentic and to make it “ours”. We worked together to change the lyrics and I though they turned out really well! There just was that one issue with singing in front of people…

I think this problem applied to everyone in our group. For me, I had no problem casually singing in front of my friends, but to do a full rehearsal singing in front of the class, I feel incredibly self conscious.

A couple weeks before the regional finals, we had to do a full run though our presentation in front of our class. Our group was not prepared and had a massive failure. We didn’t have all our our props, we didn’t know some of our lines and our singing was atrocious. It was probably a good thing we did this because we knew what to fix and what we should improve on.

Our group worked very hard on finding solutions for these challenges in those two weeks. We had another dress rehearsal about 3 days before the regional finals. I thought it went pretty well compared to our first rehearsal. We were somewhat prepared for the big day.

The regional finals was luckily held at Seycove, so we had some sort of a home advantage. The competition was held on a Saturday, for the whole day.

Finally, the day that we had been preparing for our whole lives came. ( a little bit of a exaggeration, most of us were dreading the day). I had to arrive at the school at 8 o’clock in the morning because of a parade where all the teams competing that day walked into the gym with a sign saying their team name. After this, I was fully prepared for a full day of waiting around. (There is a ton of that for DI). We had a instant challenge at 11:40 and we had to present our main challenge at 2:00.

We went and saw other people’s performance until it was time for our instant challenge. I felt as though our team performed really well during it. Due to very specific and harsh DI rules, I’m not allowed to share the details of this challenge with you. We worked really well as a team to solve the challenge.

After the instant challenge, we had to wait an extremely nerve racking two hours before we got to perform our main play. We were all really nervous beforehand. There was probably 50 people watching us and as soon as we started, I felt more at ease. Although some points of our play needed to be more fine tuned, I thought it went fine. I was glad when it ended. To be honest, it was one of the most stressful experiences I’ve had. Watch it down there!

At 5 o’clock, there was a awards presentation. Although we didn’t place for our musical, we came first for our instant challenge in our age group! It was an awesome experience.

The next week, we were given something called our raw scores, where the judges gave points for each category and we got to see what we scored. We ended up lacking points on our set change and our spectacle. Here’s a picture of all our scores.

We are going try and work hard on all of our categories and hopefully do much better in provincials!

I’ll let you know how that goes soon in another blog post.

Until then,

Nik