Recently, we had our Destination Imagination regionals tournament. It was held at seycove this year. In this post i will be talking about our work leading up to regionals, regionals itself, and what we are going to change for regionals. I won’t be talking about the instant challenge, since we are not allowed to talk about them until globals is over.

The process

This year, I’m in the fine arts group (again). Our challenge is called “Change of Tune”. The task is to create a two act musical, in which music and lyrics are used to help tell the story. The first step was to come up with deals for our story.

this video explains it better:

Idea generator
To come up with ideas for Destination Imagination, we wrote as many ideas as we could onto pieces of paper and cut them out. Once everyone was done, we spread out all the pieces of paper on the table and went through them one by one. We organized them into groups based on what they were about (ie. stage, story, setting, spectacle….etc), then went through! And got rid of the ones we didn’t like. I don’t think that we actually used any of the ideas from those pieces of paper.

Our story
The idea for our story came from one of our practice instant challenges. The instant challenge was about getting stranded at an island and meeting a tribe that communicates in a different way than you do, and you have to figure out how to communicate with them. Our story change many many times, until we finally came to the conclusion that we would be campers, going on an adventure to find and reunite two halves of a stone.

My group

Tamara, Jessie, Maggie, Lauren, and Alivia.

The set
If you have read any other blog posts from people in my group, you will know that we had many difficulties with out set. If you watched the video above, you will know that one of the challenge requirements is to use technical methods to create a set change. Our original plan was to have 1 big piece of fabric wrap horizontally around our backdrop. We had two wooden dowels on the side of the backdrop that the fabric fit in between. The idea was that when the rollers rotated, it would’ve rotated the whole set around to reveal the cave. Once we were done building the frame, painting the backdrop, and securing the dowels, we realized that it wouldn’t work. The fabric wouldn’t stay up along the top, because it was too heavy. We were originally going to fix it by tying it up with string, and unhooking it when we had to rotate it. However we quickly realized that it wouldn’t work.

Our next design
Our next design (which worked much better) was pretty different. We started by cutting out the cave from the rest of the backdrop, and hot glueing the fabric to the frame so it wouldn’t droop. We then moved one dowel to the top of the set. The idea was that we would spin the dowel with a drill, to rise and lower the cave. This actually worked when we were rehearsing, but the night before, we noticed that the wood was splitting at the end. Apparently the other dowel was also splintered, so we couldn’t use that one. So we just had to perform without a fully working backdrop.

Our new and improved hopefully working design for next time
It was decided that the set needed to be fully redone. Frame and everything. The plan for the new design is pretty different. For starters, the set will be able to fold in half (to make transportation easier). We will also be repainting the backdrop on cardboard this time. To make sure the cave rolls up better, we will be getting grey fabric (the paint is what bunched it up). We are also inserting an Allen key into a new dowel to prevent it from splintering.

The performance
As you would expect, there were good, and not so good things about our performance.

https://youtu.be/rNRUYBovHvc

I’m going to talk about some of the things that we did well first.

Improv
What’s a Destination Imagination performance without improv? During our performance there were a few times where people forgot their lines, or weren’t ready to say them. This may seem like a bad thing, but our team is great at improv. The fact that half of them were on the improv team last year probably helped with that. Rewatching our performance, there were a few points where it didn’t even look like improv, which I think is amazing.

Singing
Watching other performances, and comparing them to ours, out of all the groups performing we were some of the only people smiling, while we sung. For the most part, we stayed on pitch, and on time.

The set
This is something that didn’t go well. As I mentioned above, it was splintering the night before, so it didn’t work for the actual performance. Luckily, we have plans on how to fix all of that.

This year I would say I definitely enjoyed Destination Imagination more. Our team worked really well together and didn’t fight (too much). I am looking forward to provincials, and working more with my team.