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Browsing monthly archives: March 2024

Imagine Your Destination in Destination Imagination

And in first place… Take McFlight! What?! How?! Our solution didn’t work at all! How did we win? 

Okay, let’s rewind a bit. Destination Imagination (Or DI) is a global educational non-profit dedicated to inspiring the next generation of innovators, leaders, and creative problem solvers. Every year, there are four different challenges to choose from: Fine Arts, Engineering, Technical, and Scientific. I chose Technical, and was put in a group with three other grade 9s and one grade 10. My group members were Maddie, Lucas, Liam, and Tom.  

This year’s technical challenge is called Pinball Heroes. Each team had to make a pinball machine with three machine modules, and an action adventure story to go with it. Unfortunately, I can’t give very much details about what my group made because we have another tournament coming up. 

I think our group really struggled with communication. We basically just had a table until the night before the tournament. I think one of the reasons that we procrastinated so much was because we couldn’t find a time outside of school hours where we could all get together and work on our pinball machine. 

On the day of the tournament, we made a bunch of last minute additions and changes, and we rehearsed our play. We went to our instant challenge, which I’m not allowed to say anything about, and then we rehearsed our play some more. It was finally time. All our work from the past few months came down to that moment. Our presentation went decently, but we had a lot of holes in our story, and only half of our machine managed to work. Luckily, we were able to improvise and we ended up winning in our category. 

Rise of the Frankenstuffies

This is my sister… You might be wondering why she’s so mad. Well, I ripped her stuffies to pieces! You might think that’s pretty mean, but there’s a good reason, I promise. 

We just finished another project, so it’s time to reflect upon it. This one was called Rise of the Frankenstuffies. The goal of this project was to find out how writers make their message clear and engaging to their audience. The way we did this was by making our own stories and short movies. 

But a PLP project is never that simple.

To make our stories, first we had to read a story. We read a book called Leviathan, by Scott Westerfeld. It’s a very good book about a reimagining World War 1, between the Clankers and the Darwinists. The Clankers use very ahead-of-their-time machines, whereas the Darwinists use fabricated creatures. Keep that in mind as I tell you about making my story. 

The first step of writing my story was making my character. But instead of just imagining our character, we made them in real life! We cut pieces off of stuffies and sewed them together in fun and goofy ways. But there was one problem… I don’t really have any stuffies. Luckily, my sister let me have some of her old ones. I ended up using Mickey Mouse’s body and legs, Blues clues’s ears, a cat’s head, a tiger’s nose, a unicorn’s horn, and a monkey’s arms. Doesn’t that sound like the Darwinist’s fabricated creatures? Hmm, I wonder if that’s why we read Leviathan and not some other book haha. 

Okay, now that I have my character, I need to come up with a back story for him. I’ll give you a quick summary of what I came up with:

Specimen #12, 036 was estimated to have been born in November 2006. He has no known ancestors in over 2 000 years. He is being studied in a science lab, and can’t remember a time when he wasn’t. He doesn’t have a proper name, so he goes by 36 (Short for Specimen #12, 036). He forces the scientist to pay him $9 500/month to research him. 

Now that I have my main character, I can start to decide what will happen in my story. I learnt about the hero’s journey, and wrote a summary of what would happen in each section. 

I decided that instead of writing and filming my whole story, I would just do a section of it with more details. I chose to use the 5th and 6th sections, because they have the most action. I plotted out my story using a Transition-Action-Details template where I listed what happens in each scene, how each scene starts, and the extra details about each scene. 

It’s finally time to write the story. It would’ve been way harder to write with out having done all the planning and preparation. I think as the story went along, I started slowly adding less details but I think I did a very good job on it. 

The place is a mess. The mess has been growing exponentially since Jill was here last. Jill, the lab’s janitor, has been gone for the past week. But she’s suddenly back, and she isn’t cleaning the mess. Instead she’s acting as the scientist’s servant.

“Jill, get me a pencil!” Demands the scientist. That’s vey rude, 36 thinks to himself in his hiding spot on the roof. Jill walks over to the shelf, opens it and pulls out a pencil. She turns around and hands it to the scientist. Her movements seem kind of zombie-like to 36. The scientist scribbles something down in his notebook. “Eraser!” He calls. Jill does as she’s told, still weirdly. The scientist erases something and keeps writing. “Calculator!” He shouts again, and in no time Jill’s giving it to him. The scientist types out some numbers, and exclaims “Yes! I’m just about done! All I need now is Specimen 12, 036’s armpit hair. Jill, go get me a beaker to put them in.”.

36 has to get back to the basement and pluck his armpit hair before the scientist gets there. But the scientist is faster. 36 thinks on his feet. He grabs Jill’s foot, and trips her. She falls, and the beaker in her hand smashes. The scientist comes back to see what the noise was, and 36 sprints out the door towards the basement.

When 36 gets back to the basement, the scientist is still cleaning up the glass upstairs with Jill. 36 uses the magic watch that the specimen in the room next door gave him to go back to normal size. He runs over to the counter on the other side of the room and grabs a pair of scissors. He clips off his last armpit hairs, and puts them in his pocket. He hears footsteps. The scientist is on his way! He has to hurry.

36 finds the jar labeled Nogrow and lathers it all over his armpits, desperately hoping the potion does what he expects it to based on it’s name. Hopefully it’ll stop his armpit hair from regrowing. The footsteps are getting louder. He looks around the room, and notices his gatch bed, just like the kind in hospitals. Trying to act normal, he leaps onto the bed right as the door handle turns. The scientist walks in with a victorious grin on his face.

The scientist goes to collect 36’s armpit hair, and finds there’s none! His armpit is as smooth as butter! “What!” He shouts. “This can’t be! What have you done, you bastard!?”. He notices the empty Nogrow bottle, and in the scientist’s fit of rage, chucks it across the room. With the scientist distracted, 36 takes the opportunity to use the magic watch to shrink back down to the size of a mouse. He scurries under the door, and back up to Jill’s room. When he arrives, Jill is back to her normal self. She’s busy mopping the floor. The effect must have worn off!

Jill watches in amazement as 36 grows back to his normal size in the span of a couple seconds. “No time to explain” he calls as he runs to the counter. He finds the beaker that the scientists was making the potion in, and adds the final ingredient. His armpit hair. He knows that the scientist will come into this room sooner or later. “Jill, when the scientist comes in, do exactly what he tells you to, but kinda act like a zombie, okay? Hold this beaker out of his sight and when you get a chance, splash it into his mouth.” 36 instructs, handing the potion to Jill.

The scientist storms into the room. “Jill, catch that rascal!” He yells. 36 runs out of the room, dodging the scientist’s attempts of grabbing him. Following 36’s instructions, Jill goes after him. As she runs past the scientist, Jill splashes the potion into his mouth.

The scientist stands straight upright, awaiting instruction. “Did it work?” 36 wonders out loud. “I still don’t even know what’s happening. Can you explain now?” Jill responds. “Not now, Jill.” 36 says. He turns to the scientist. “Let’s test it. Do 5 jumping jacks.”. He says. The scientist complies. “It’s working!” 36 exclaims. “Go to the police station, and tell them what you’ve been planning.” The scientist the starts walking towards the door. 36 and Jill follow him all the way to the police station where he pleads guilty to everything he’s done.

 

Now that I’m done the story, I can start to make my movie. I started off my making a storyboard. In the past, I’ve often struggled with storyboards, and this one was no different. I find that they really don’t help me make a video/movie/film out of a text, and they just waste time when I have to draw every scene (Even just a very rough stick person and background). Also, for me, time stamping scenes is hard and unhelpful, because I can’t guess how long something will take very well, and if I guess too low, it throws everything off.

However, during this project, I found a way for me to make storyboards that are helpful to me. If I just write a brief description of each shot on separate keynote slides, I can easily look for what I need to do there. When I finish each shot, I put the clip over top of the keynote slide, effectively crossing it off the list. Now that I have that figured out, I will be able to make videos much easier in the future. 

Speaking of making videos… 

If was very difficult to make my movie because I was using multiple different apps, and multiple features of these apps that I’d never used before. I used PuppetPals for the first time ever, and it was very hard to put each piece from each app together. But after a lot of work, I finally finished!

Enjoy!

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