When I first heard of D.I I was honestly pretty freaked out, as the thought of talking in front of large crowds and being judged on how I did frankly terrified me. But someway somehow in the end we managed to get first place.
It all begun on a cold Monday morning, I got my bags and got dropped off by my parents. I then stepped foot inside the classroom and noticed that the grade 8’s, 9’s and the 10’s were all sat down in front of the projector. I obviously knew something was up but I didn’t know what it was so I sat down and waited. After about 5 min the teacher turned on the projected and explained what D.I was all about. A couple of days passed and I didn’t really hear anything about it but that was soon to change. I got to class and the teacher showed us our groups and told us to get into them and that’s just what I did. I slowly went up the stairs with only one thing on my mind, the big presentation.
The first thing we had to do was brainstorming on our topic. We started off pretty simple just listing off ideas we had for the materials we would use but as time went on we just kept on listing everything that came to our heads which resulted in a product that both aligned with our sense of humour and personalities but also made sense and touched on some recent events. We also managed to come up with some pretty interesting concepts for our machine. Eventually we begun building our actual product (beanbag launcher), here I feel like I actually managed to try out a couple of new things which will probably help me in the future. In the process of building we all worked on a different thing which worked out pretty well as in the end we managed to finish our machine and our story pretty early on. I personally worked on the machine which was a huge learning opportunity for me as I managed to learn how to use hammers, drills and saws.
Unfortunately there came a point where we didn’t really have any more class time so we had to either work before or after school but we managed to turn this around and spent a considerable amount of time tweaking and making new props, costumes and our old stuff.
After weeks of anticipation and hard work it was finally time to unveil our final product and show the world what we had been working on. When I got to the school I have to admit I was pretty anxious as I was already scared of talking in front of large audiences and the aspect of people judging me on my performance sent chills down my spine but I remembered all the work we had put into it and tried my best. We went inside of a small room and begun presenting our presentation as we rehearsed. It was terrifying in the beginning but as time went on I felt like we eased into it and gave pretty decent performances, the audience also laughed at all of our jokes which was a relief and definitely helped me deal with the whole thing. Our machine also worked pretty well, even though there was some small issues. But overall I thought it went great but I felt like for next time I maybe could memorize the script a bit better as I said a line in the wrong time and kind of screwed up the pacing (it didn’t really affect our performance though as we were decent at improvising) A couple of hours passed and it was finally time to see if we had won or not. My heart begun beating pretty quickly as they came closer to our category and when it came time to talk about ours I could barely breathe but eventually it was announced and it turned out we had actually won.
Overall I believe we did this good because of our ability to work as a team, our ability to adapt to tough situations and our hard work.