Welcome back to DI. Destination Imagination is back again and I have just finished regionals in my group. If you remember my last post in DI you would know that last year I was in the technical challenge. This year I am in the Scientific challenge. This year the goal of the challenge is to portray a first encounter between a species and a habitat and show how the encounter effects and changes them. We also have to use technical methods to show the changes in both the species and the habitat. My group this year is Ally, Alex , Julia, Kaden , and Ben. Thankfully all of us got along well and we were able to divide up our tasks evenly.
Our solution for our challenge involved the Black Mamba, and the forested savanna of Florida. We tried to make our habitat morph using a scissor lift. Our plan was to have the Black Mamba, Bubbles, restore the ecosystem which is where are morph comes in. The story is on the lines of this; the Forrest Savanna of Florida is being over run by a rodent population. This means that the rodents are eating too much seed and not leaving enough for the ecosystem to continue. The ecosystem is unbalanced and the forest is dying. Thankfully, some reaserchers discover this and send for a black mamba to exterminate the rat population. Unfortunately they send the wrong snake and Bubbles isn’t strong enough to kill the palm rats himself. That’s where his fairy snake mother comes in to save the day. They exterminate the rat population, using some magic, and the day is saved.
What we did:
Our final result was defiantly not something I would say I was proud of. True, we had put in a lot of time and effort, but on the day of the performance it was easy to tell that we hadn’t met the requirements of the challenge. We didn’t incorporate enough “science” to the scientific challenge meaning that there was nothing for the audience to learn. On top of that both of our morphs were not dramatic enough and hard to identify. The scissor lift was incredibly slow and hard to notice unless you were watching it the whole time. We had tried to make our own, but we had chosen the wrong materials and it was too weak. By the time we reached the performance we didn’t have enough time to make another one so we had used a premodern one that wasn’t built by us. The species morph, meant to change the colour of the snake, had not science behind it and was just their for flashy effects. We also timed it wrong and had to improvise because the costume was falling off. On the bright side our story wasn’t too bad and our team choice element, which was live clarinet music, scored fairly well. We were also complimented by a couple of people on our set pieces which looked really good.
What we need to change:
After a team meeting discussing the faults of our Reginals performance, our group decided that change needed o happen. A lot of it and fast. We quickly realized that the scissor lift idea haven’t worked and would ba a waste of energy to work on. So we scrapped the idea and decided that we would use and air pump instead which is much easier to make and also looks a little better. We also decided that we would add lights to our tree to make it as dramatic as possible.
After talking with Ben and Kaden, who had played the snake, we realized that the costume for the snake wasn’t going to make the cut either. It was too big to fit in the stage area and the actors could not see where they were going. After talking with the audience it was also noted that it was hard to hear what they were saying. So we decided that we would make another costume. This time, we would make sure that Ben could see and that it fit on his cloths so it didn’t take up that much space. We would use recycled bottles to help make the scales on the costume and also become our second team choice element; using recycled materials.
The final main change that we would be making is to the story. Though the story did have a good concept to it, we still needed more facts to back it up. As such we are doing more research on the Black Mambas, Forested Savanna, and Palm Rats to learn about how we can make a more realistic story that still has a wow factor.
I find that DI is always really stressing and really fun. I am glad that I have a group that works well together and is open to each other’s ideas. This means that we are able to reach consensus much quicker, and everyone can be happy with the solution that we provide. We are defiantly going to be working hard to get back to where we want to be and you can check out how we did in my upcoming provincials post!