Destination Imagination 2.0

It’s that time of the year again for DI (Destination Imagination). With this being our second year we are going back as stronger teams with more understanding for the challenges. If you would like to check out last year’s DI challenge click here.

Destination Imagination is a program that consists of 6 different categories including fine arts, engineering, technical, improvisational, outreach and scientific challenges for all ages from preschool children up to college students. These challenges get you to express your creativity and imagination by completing these challenges without the help or interference of any adult. The goal is teaching children to solve problems they are faced with.

DI also contains instant challenges that test our teamwork, time management and creativity by putting us on the spot with either a task based challenge or a performance based challenge. Here is an example of each instant challenge:

This year I was put into the fine arts challenge group, which I was happy about because last year I participated in the technical challenge which, was fun but at times very difficult. Last year, it felt as if our whole group wasn’t putting in a full contribution and all their effort to complete the challenge. The fine arts challenge consists of putting together a presentation for the requirements of that challenge, however each year there is a new twist to the challenge. This year, the challenge was called Vanished and was based around telling a story about how the disappearance of a single colour changes the world. We also had to include a colourful character and a vanishing act.

At first, it was quite hard to come up with an idea as a group but after a while we had too many ideas. It was overwhelming but we were able to narrow it down to a few main ideas and started writing a script. We decided to base all the characters in the story off of colours making them act like how that colour represents itself to the world. The storyline was about the disappearance of the colour Yellow and how the detective Rainbow from the CIA goes on a mission to find the primary colour. The one thing I think my group could have done for our script was to make it a little simpler because at times it was very confusing for the audience and judges to understand.

Our story starts off in an abandoned building halfway through the mission with Rainbow on the right track to finding Yellow as the building is the resting point for the ones who stole the colour (The group the Eye of Rah). We then flash back to the day of the colour’s disappearance, after this we cut to a scene where Rainbow is investigating two agents to try and find out who stole the colour. Detective Rainbow finds out that Blue stole the colour but Yellow won’t confess. After investigating Blue more, she finally confessed and gives Rainbow a script with Egyptian hieroglyphics on it. This was our vanishing act and the answer to the colour’s disappearance. What we did was first research Egyptian hieroglyphics and translated it letter for letter to say, “yellow is located by the great sphinx of Giza” in English. Then to create our vanishing act, we cut these letters out of paper and glued them to the back of a big piece of paper with the hieroglyphics written on it. To make the paper look older we used coffee to give it an aged look. Here is a video of us painting the paper:

The one problem with our vanishing act was that it was more of an appearing act. It didn’t really follow the requirements for the vanishing act although our group thought it did. After the vanishing act and detective Rainbow finding the location of Yellow the story heads to Giza. Detective Rainbow arrives and finds Yellow but then Blue shows up and they think that the detective has fallen into their trap. It turns out the police have them surrounded and that is how the story ends.
This is our script, the difference between the first draft and final draft:
First draft:

Final draft:

After the month and a half of planning and preparing for DI, we went to Regionals. It turns out there were only two groups in our category for our age group. The other group had gone to Globals and had won last year. This made it a little nerve racking but we gave it our full effort and practiced as much as we could for our performance. We ended up getting second place of the two teams:
Here are the rough scores and notes the judges gave us:

Overall, I think we did pretty well but we have quite a few things we could improve upon especially our vanishing act and making our story less complicated for the next level at Provincials.