Destination imagination
Destination imagination where do I start. Have you ever met someone who thoroughly enjoyed participating in a competition, with kids of varying ages (90% younger than you) and getting stressed because all 13 people in audience did not laugh at your joke, and the “appraisers” who are actually not “appraising” but brutally judging your work, are wearing hats that make you feel claustrophobic in a gym, because I haven’t, not yet.
Im glad I was able to share that paragraph above with you, reader, even though I am super hard on DI, there are a few things that surface that will help in the future, lets get started.
Destination Surrey.
Time 8 am
Saturday April 7th
*disclaimer: I had only been home for 2 days, and jet lag was hitting me hard. Getting up at 7 on that Saturday was the most dreadful thing*
I was lucky in the fact that I did not have to haul the back drops to surrey. Melika’s dad was able to take them in his glass van. I am 2 characters in our story so all I had to take was the clothing that I needed, and food. Speaking of our story I should explain it to you. It is a little confusing so read carefully.
There is a boy, Richard, he falls asleep in class while learning about electricity. (There’s a test at the end of his class) He wakes up ( in his dream ) and is on a planet called phoebe. On phoebe there’s a fidget spinner ride, and he really wants to ride it. He has to take a safety test, and while this is happening, there is another guy that shows up at the planet. This guys name is Millard ( he’s the only one there with a name that doesn’t start with r) (foreshadowing). Millard gets a tour of the park, and Richard goes back to his test, but then Millard takes all the magic from the dream land, and if he leaves with it then the whole dream land will be ended. So everyone goes to find him, and he goes right to Richard, they have a talk and solve all of there problems, and then everyone finds Richard hanging out with Millard. Millard apologizes, and then he rides the fidget spinner, and then it is Richards turn to ride the fidget spinner, but his teacher is trying to wake him up. But don’t worry, when Richard did the safety test for the carousel, the safety test was all about the things on his actual test, creative right. Well he writes the test and he gets everything correct and has a great time. And thats the story. Not my proudest moment, a little to confusing for an 8 minute performance, but I did feel our story was a creative way to express our challenge.
Another part of the challenge was our team choice elemnts. For our first team choice element, we made light up masks to make the separation between the characters that were part of the dream planet, and the guests.
These light up masks were made to look like sleep masks to make the dream planet all the more relatable, to the viewers. They ended up mostly causing a whole bunch of commotion. It turns out that you can’t have any sort of electricity/wires in your presentation, or something like that. In the end they let us preform with the masks, but that only dragged our total mark up by a tiny amount…
Our other team choice element was our drums, which were not appraised, but absolutely butchered when it came to marks. I thought that these drums were going to be a great source of marks and that the appraisers would like like them, a lot, but no such luck. The drums main purpose was to bring up our marks, it was also there to, well there was really no other point of them.
To complete this presentation we needed backdrops. Remember we had two separate scenes. One in the classroom, and one on the dream planet of phoebe. These back drops took a lot of time to make, but thanks to the handy work from, Melika, Kailey, and I, we got it done. Melika and Kailey painted the cardboard that would work as the visual aspect of the backdrop, but then it was up to me to figure out how to make them actually stand up. I worked on different shapes that would benefit the structure in different ways, in the end I ended up with a wood frame with 3-4 vertical pieces between each side. Now this would not stand up on its own, so I added four triangles in each corner. To keep the whole shape up. This technique worked really well, and the appraisers really liked my handy work.
Now reader you must remember that we had already participated in a competition, a month earlier. We placed third in that competition, and I found that position really nice, and I thought our team was very deserving of that spot. In our most recent competition we placed fourth, which was also last. I was mostly to blame for that spot. I had been away in Australia for the whole week, and so my team didn’t get much practice time. Which we showed in our presentation, sadly. I think everything in our presentation went well, but our acting faltered, which rewarded us with fourth.
I would like to share with you some things that I learned the hard way during this experience.
So lets get started.
Minimalist, not maximunist. What I mean by this is don’t go overboard. The simpler the better. Also if you focus your work on the making the few items you have better, you would end up with a stronger presentation, and the appraisers, might even appraise it. Also you wouldn’t have to haul all the half wited props to and from the competitions. An example of using your time to efficiently make your objects the best they can be, is The Droplets. The Droplets made there whole presentation visually satisfying, and kept it to a minimal for props. But even though they had minimal props, every prop was perfected, it was an art. There presentation could have gone on for an hour longer, and the only thing that would eventually make me get up, would be the weights clanging against each other as Logan dropped them on the structure. It was satisfying to watch, all the matching colours, the clear story line, everything was there.
That’s what I call appraising!
To end this blog post I would like to say thank you to my team, for giving there best in the competition, and thank you to our teachers, I guess, for forcing this experience upon us. I know I’ve been extremely hard on it throughout this post, but it taught us all unique skills that we may need for our futures. Things like handy work, and writing, also acting skills, such a as acting on the spot, becoming a character and many more. I am not completely fond of the outline of DI, but I must admit that it does strengthen some skills that may need strengthening!
Anyway thanks for reading, and I hoped you learned something about the PLP renounced, Destination Imagination.