Hello again! and welcome to my post on the DI Provincials. If you haven’t checked out my DI Regionals post I do suggest that, it will make things a little more clear. But in a quick summary I was in the improv team with my teammates Noah, Malaika, Jude, Anthony and Rhiann. We had just finished the regional tournament, which turned out all pretty good in my opinion, but it gave us a lot of ideas on what we could improve on for out provincial tournament. Except, there was one small problem. Since that darn virus, COVID-19 shut down all the schools, DI was also canceled. But did you really think that was going to stop our teachers!?!?! of course not! That was just a small inconvenience but of course they found a way around it. They decided we were going to do an online tournament instead.
We didn’t have that much time before the online tournament, so it was up to us to meet on our own time and come up with a plan. The first major problem we decided to work on was acting. How were we supposed to act on camera? Well, this one was actually pretty easy, we would just say lines normally in front of our cameras when it was out turn. Except, that brings us to another one of the problems we had from the last tournament, our cues. Now, our cues weren’t great, there was still lots of room to improve. To help combat this problem, we decided to use a narrator again to help bring the scene together to it wouldn’t be so confusing. We did this so that anthony, the narrator, could give obvious cues and progress the story of things were taking too long. But still the problem isn’t fixed by just by having a narrator, so we did some practice runs together on zoom calls and FaceTime calls, to help make sure we could read the cues and work on our acting. However, this brings me to our final and possibly biggest problem, the sound effects. We did have one person working on the sounds, Noah, but there was one insy problem, the sound box was at school! And because the school is closed we had to improvise, we ended up helping nomad brainstorm ideas on what we could do for sound effects, and eventually Noah had found enough things that he could work with. We did some practice with our cues and all the new sound effects, and we were actually looking pretty good!
The online event was scheduled like an actual DI tournament, each team had their team name and what time they were going to present, including their instant challenge. Eventually, it was our time to present, and it was time for all of that practice to pay off. I was actually really nervous at first, but all things went well, it went pretty smoothly, and everyone preformed well, just like we had practiced. The instant challenge also happened to be a performance challenge, and we did pretty well on that as well. In conclusion, I think we all greatly improved even though we had a bunch of challenges we had to face. I think I managed to meet the competency for this project. I’m really proud of everyone and I’m really glad we didn’t cancel!
~ Emily