This whole month has been a blur. Especially because of Covid 19. Events have been cancelled, parks closed, and even the number of people you can meet has been limited. This means that the provincials tournament had to be cancelled. However, PLP would not let the work we did for the regional tournament go to waste! We decided that we would hold an online tournament. It took some creative quick thinking but we did it. So how did we get to where we are now?

After our underwhelming success at the regional tournament my group, Alex, Ally, Julia, Kaden, Ben, and I got together to discuss what we could improve. We had decided that the snake costume would work much better if there was only one person wearing it. On top of that a lot had gone wrong in the species and habitat morph. So we had decided to completely change how we were going to do both of them and were every discussing whether to continue using the snake as our species. In the end we decided that we would keep the snake as our species but we were going to change the costume and the morph. 

For the species morph decided that we would use recycled bottles to create a scale effect and would turn inside out when the actor opened the neck flaps to represent the morph. The plastic bottles also helped to emphasize our team choice element which was recycled materials. Our second team choice element, live music, had gotten a lot of positive feedback and gained us a lot of points so we had kept it in our performance. 

The story that we wrote itself was fairly good but we need more science in our scientific challenge so integrating that into our performance became a focus for us. Finally, we decided that the scissor lift that we had originally used wasn’t going to make the cut. We had used the wrong materials to make it and it wasn’t strong or fast enough to make a dramatic enough effect. Using an air pump became an attractive idea. It would be easier to make and much faster in the transition. We would also be adding lights that turn in once the morph begins to make it happen. 

Of course that was what we had planned on doing before the break started. However during the break, once more and more news about Covid began spreading and restrictions were made we found it difficult to find times to meet up and work on these changes. One of the most problematic challenges that we faced with the online performance was that all of the supplies and props that we had we had left at school. This meant that we would have to improvise with the little materials that we found lying around the house. Luckily the app that we were using, zoom, has a virtual background feature that lets us green screen photos that we created. Our group decided that we would focus mainly of adding scientific facts into our script which ended up becoming our strongest asset. Finally, the most common problem that we found in all of our meeting and in our final performance was the lag and internet connection. There were a few times in our rehearsals where I couldn’t hear what my group was saying and missed my cue to come in. To fix this problem we muted our mic’s or turned off our video. In our instant challenge one of our group members got kicked out due to a connection problem and we had to improvise on the spot.

This was a really fun experience and it was nice to have something to do while being stuck inside. All in all I am proud of my group for being able to adapt to circumstance really well. This project has taught me how to better problem solve and communicate.

below you can see some photos from our online rehearsals!