So this year had been quite similar to past years. We had our student-led-conferences, we did our winter exhibition, and we went on our big trip. Although those were all great experiences, it feels like there’s something missing from the batch… Something that makes each year so much more different. What is it again?
Oh, right! We did DI! For those who don’t know what DI, or Destination Imagination is, I would definitely recommend checking out this post as I’m just going to get right into what we did this year.
This year has definitely been an interesting one for DI. For the past two years, all of us have been getting pretty comfortable with DI and all of us have more or less done the same challenges throughout the years. For example, since grade 8, I’ve done the categories that focused mainly on engineering and technical aspects. The beginning of our DI journey felt pretty similar to most of the beginnings we’ve had. The beginning of our journey in this case was to fill in a survey that let us pick the challenges that we wanted to do the most and the challenge that would be our worst nightmare to compete in. Like always, I picked the technical and engineering challenges as it’s sort of my go-to. For my “worst nightmare“ choice, I picked the Fine Arts Challenge as this year would require singing and trust me, my voice is not ready for the public yet…
What kind of program would PLP be if it didn’t challenge you though? What ended up happening was that a lot of people ended up getting their worst-nightmare choices, and I was no different. So I was placed in the Fine Arts Challenge and I was bummed. I was also placed with Robbie, Sofia, and Hannah. What we were told before the selection process was that we were going to be placed with people with skill sets different to our own and fortunately for my group, that was definitely the case. All of us were completely against singing in front of an audience except for one person… Robbie. With that in mind, we immediately started assigning roles in the group for specific aspects for our challenge.
This year, the Fine Arts Challenge required for us to have our own music and lyrics, a spectacle with two theatrical methods, a set change with a technical method, two scenes, a story with a change in plans, two team choice elements, and more. What I didn’t realize coming into this challenge was that the Fine Arts Challenge wasn’t all that different from the previous challenges I’ve done in the past. The biggest factor for why it didn’t feel different was for how I contributed to the challenge. I always take the role of coming up with the story and script so this year wasn’t any different for me. I also did a lot of the building that was required for our challenge; set, props, etc. Our jobs were very well distributed as all of us in the group had something to bring to the table that was different from everyone else. For example, Robbie was able to create the music and perform like his life depended on it, Sofia was able to create the artistic aspects of our project, and Hannah was able to choreograph a dance performance! Either way, I was feeling a lot better about doing the challenge this year. So what did we do?
Remember how I talked about how no one in our group wanted to sing? Well thanks to Robbie, I was able to create a story that could revolve him taking charge of the singing. Although I can write about our whole performance, why not show it to you? Before that, here’s some context. So our story starts off with an office. There are three employees working at their desks when suddenly, their boss comes in and slams a file on the main character’s (me) desk. The main character then gets to work on the files while the two other employees start messing around and creating music with staplers. The main character angrily protests against the music, saying that it’s a waste of time but Robbie (one of the workers) fights back and starts a song, urging that music is great and the main character has a musical spirit too. This is where the video starts…
Anyways, let’s get into the technical parts of our challenge, shall we? Starting off with our set change, we probably didn’t do the best job of making a cool change as we did just use a pulley-system to pull our first background off. We did however, do a good job with the scene change as the part where we went back in time made it clear that we changed scenes. For our spectacle, it may not have been too obvious but Robbie doing the handstand was our spectacle… let me explain… Essentially, our spectacle required two theatrical methods that were described in this list…
We chose acrobatics and costumes as Robbie doing the handstand was definitely and acrobatic feat and him changing his clothes while doing it was the costume aspect. I may not have been our most creative idea but it got the job done. Moving on, we had two team choice elements which we shared with the audience. The first was a homemade set of bongos which were made of PVC pipe and were designed to have a hippy aesthetic. The second was Robbie’s pants as the designs and flower patterns were completely done by Hannah and Sofia. Both of these worked really well into our script as the bongos were used to show Hannah quitting her job to join the hippy movement and Robbie’s pants… well he was wearing them.
The most important part obviously was our script and music and I really think we delivered. Although you already know about the story, I want to talk a little about our music. So we struggled a little when it came to making our first song as we didn’t really know where to start. We figured that since our performance was more on the humorous side, we could do parodies of popular songs. With that in mind, we decided to start our first song off from an episode of Phineas and Ferb. We used the instrumental and restructured it to work with our song. Next up, we used the song, I’m A Believer, before and during our set change. I really enjoyed this aspect of our competition as it was a huge learning curve to create and prepare a song which we had to perform in front of a crowd.
Anyways, our performance came and went… And we did awesome! I was slightly worried beforehand as although we all had our script completely memorized, we struggled to finish within the time limit each time we practiced. We hustled before our performance to get one last practice in and it definitely payed off as I think we finished just before our time ended. The dress rehearsal that we had to do in front of the class definitely helped me with my confidence and I think I was able to give a pretty good performance.
Anyways, we got first place! Although there were only three teams to begin with, I felt really proud of our whole team as although we had our weaknesses, we really pulled through for our performance. We automatically qualified for provincials and that’s where the real challenge starts as two of our four group members aren’t going to be there for provincials. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it right? I mean, it’s only three weeks away… *sigh…
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