Its that time of the year again. Destination Imagination!

For those of you who don’t live the DI life style, I’ll explain so you can follow along. Destination Imagination (or DI) is a DIY competition in which my class participates every year. It is meant to be an opportunity to show off our creative skills through one of many different challenges. The solutions to these challenges are at four different levels:  Regional, Provincial, National, and Global. This year Regional was held at my school!

It was good that the Regionals where so close to home because me and my team (Lucas, Sofia, and Hannah) where able to easily transport and build our props and background for our challenge. Our challenge was called Change Of Tune and fell in the category of Fine Arts.

Our challenge was to create a two-act musical with a set change using technical elements and a memorable spectacle, to name just a few of the requirements. If you would like to read about the full rules, see below for the video.

Every rule, no matter how challenging or inconvenient, is important. Breaking the rules can lead to a loss of points. So the first thing my team did was read the rules.

 

After the rules, we brainstormed ideas.  In class, we did an activity to get our brain juices flowing. Each member of our team filled-out a chart of ideas such as story, props, music, set, etc. We then cut the chart part into paper squares with the ideas that we came up with and then organized the squares into groups.

 

We ended up making our story around a Ghost of Christmas Past theme. We decided to make our story around an office worker who learned the magic of music from the Ghost of Music Past. The spectacle was me, Robbie, revealing my true identity as the Ghost of Music Past.

Our cast was as follows:

• Grumpy Lucas: Lucas
• Ghost Of Music Past: Robbie
• Robbie: Robbie
• Boss: Hannah
• Worker: Sofia
• Boss’s Mom: Hannah
• 60’s Worker: Sofia
• Dancers: Hannah, Sofia

After we had our story figured figured out, we then completed our forms. In the weeks leading up to the tournament, we needed to fill out a few forms. They focus din areas like team management, team goals, story line, and budget. We also made charts for the deliverables required of our challenge:

Another element of our challenge was to have two team choice elements. Team choice elements are incorporated into your performance. These can be athletics, instruments, etc.. In our performance, we chose an instrument as a team choice element and made a three-tone drum. We also incorporated a handstand into our spectacle.This hand stand required a lot of practised but it paid off, even if it was not perfect during the performance.

We purchased wood for our backdrop and built a nice frame to support it and worked to incorporate a sort of technical element into the changing of the backdrop.

Other members of the team spent time buying and putting together really good costumes that reflected the time period (60’s) of the performance.

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I was responsible for putting together the music we played and sang so I did some research around 60’s music. I identified two pieces of music that would work and then and put together lyrics for two, key music parts of the performance.

 

We practised a fair bit at school and on our own, over the weekends leading up to the main event, which was a bit challenging because our class as away in California for 10 days just prior to the event.

The day of the competition, we were feeling pretty confident and our performance went really well. We remembered our lines and everything worked properly. The only hiccup we had was a prop almost fell over. We were able to handle ir because one of our group members caught it before it fell.

We placed first out of four teams. I was pretty happy about this because this was the first time my team won a DI competition with that many people competing against us.

My group’s performance was awesome but we are going to need to re-design some sections of the performance because me and Sofia won’t be at provincials due to extracurricular events.

We have a lot to revise and remake before our next competition. I’ll make another post after the competition so please stay tuned.