Yep, I’m back. And it’s DI! Don’t make me explain this again.

Did you read that link? Understand? Okay, cool. So, we got assigned the engineering challenge. We being Chadam, Claire, Mimi, Ryan, Michael, and myself. This was the video we got to describe our challenge:

This had a lot of deliverables. But most importantly, we had to think of a name. Originally we were French Vanilla (don’t ask), but we didn’t like that. So, we thought of a much more sophisticated and professional name:

(Above, our team outside of a restaurant called Tender Greens)

Then we had to think of a story. In years past, we’ve always gone with a funny story. I find it easier to write funny (as you know if you’ve ever read my blog) because I like making people laugh. So it was a step out of my comfort zone when we decided to do a serious story on the topic of social anxiety. Claire volunteered to be the main character, a girl with anxiety. Mimi got to play the teacher, Adam played a jock-esque character named Chad, Ryan played Claire’s brother, and Michael played a nerdy character named Garrett. Naturally, I got to be the antagonist. I was the physical embodiment of anxiety.

So we have Claire, Teacher, Chad, Garrett, Claire’s Brother, and me. An actual demon. It’s like the Friends cast, but a lot worse.

Anyways, our story talks about the life of a girl who has anxiety, the physical embodiment of anxiety following her around telling her everything that she’s doing wrong. Eventually, our Sudden Impact is that she has a panic attack in class.

Our structure that we had to drop weights onto wound up being a simple cylinder, with a lot of self-deprecating words on them. The point in the story where we dropped the weights, I would be shouting at Claire things such as “you suck”, “you’ll never go anywhere in life”, “Chad is judging you”, etc. It was a fun part to play.

For the Event Depictor, something that has to predict the sudden event, we had Michael make a podium with built in speakers, that would play disruptive noises as Claire has her panic attack.

Finally, we had to have two Team Choice Elements, that show off our team’s skills and interests. First of all, Claire is really good at making things aesthetically pleasing, and makeup. So Character Design was our first one. Chad had tattoos, Ryan got a beard, I got angsty raccoon eyes. Our second TCE (let me abbreviate things in peace, MOM) was our background, where we projected images to help support the story telling of where we were.

Next came practice. It was hard, at first, to get our whole team to get together. But it worked, and we banged out an amazing performance.

(Editor’s note: to “Bang Out” is not a phrase. It sounded right at the time)

Then came performance day. I was nervous, partially because I had a splitting headache and my head was screaming at me

But we went, and the day went really well! We got a few photos, and you can see what we looked like on the day:

(Chad discusses important things with Claire, such as French homework, as a Wild Anxiety judges them silently)

(Anxiety gets to scream mean things at Claire while others watch. Fun times)

(The teacher explains the homework. No one wants homework, so they’re all just pretending to listen)

I can confidently say that’s the best I’ve ever felt about DI. Our raw scores were very good, better than I’ve done in the past.

We wound up getting 3rd place out of 7, so that’s not bad!

Thats all for this post

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