Our final meeting of 2008! We had a nice long three hour meeting this afternoon. A lot of progress was made on the story and some progress on set design. The team also did a fun quick instant challenge.
The story is still a work in process but one read through, a fairly major re-write, and another read through did happen today.
On the set front there is at least one concept on how to build the huge bee hive, flowers, and blades of grass. Next year our meeting will most likely shift to the Warpinski's house, they've agree to allow us to use the extra room above their garage to do our set construction. I'll send more details as they become available.
The instant challenge today had the team building a support between two tables to hang two gondolas from (there was some debate about what a gondola is, the most famous example are flat bottomed boats used in Venice, however they are also cars suspended from cables commonly used on ski lifts), if the team succeeded in hanging the cars the final stage involved loading the gondolas down. The team worked well together and came up with a solution capable of supporting both gondolas and all of the weights.
Our next meeting is schedule for Sunday January 4th from noon - 3pm. I'll be in touch after Christmas to finalize the time and location.
The photo album has been updated with pictures from today's meeting.
I hope everyone has a happy, restful, safe Christmas holiday break.
Until next year,
Mr. H
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Meeting #7 - 12/13/08
Today's meeting was "get serious" time, this meeting and one more and the 2008 portion of the DI season is over, once 2009 hits things move fast and before we know it tournament will be here. The team broke up into two groups, with one group working on the story and one group brainstorming ways to build the sets.
Some good progress was made on the story, I won't go into details but it's starting to take shape and sounding promising. The big challenge is going to be building the sets. A part of the challenge is building three dimensional set pieces instead of just simple flat painted backdrops (or in addition to). The team plans to build a huge bee hive that they can rotate on stage so they can have some scenes inside the hive and some scenes outside the hive. Right now they have no idea how they are going to build this. They also have some plans to build parts of the sets in such a way that the bees can appear to fly. Their plan is to have a blue "sky" backdrop and stairs moving to a raised platform also painted blue so by walking up the stairs and onto the platform it appears they are flying off the ground.
The team then did a quick instant challenge where they had the usual collection of DI stuff (Popsicle sticks, cotton balls, balloons, paper clips, mailing labels, etc.) and had to create a new winter sport. They had 8 minutes to create the sport and plan a theatrical presentation about their new sport, the performance was to last 2 minutes. Their sport involved some type of downhill event with balloons, jumps, and goal post type things. I believe the sport was played by hamsters who were inside of their exercise balls (the balloon).
That is all for this week, next week the last meeting of 2008!
Some good progress was made on the story, I won't go into details but it's starting to take shape and sounding promising. The big challenge is going to be building the sets. A part of the challenge is building three dimensional set pieces instead of just simple flat painted backdrops (or in addition to). The team plans to build a huge bee hive that they can rotate on stage so they can have some scenes inside the hive and some scenes outside the hive. Right now they have no idea how they are going to build this. They also have some plans to build parts of the sets in such a way that the bees can appear to fly. Their plan is to have a blue "sky" backdrop and stairs moving to a raised platform also painted blue so by walking up the stairs and onto the platform it appears they are flying off the ground.
The team then did a quick instant challenge where they had the usual collection of DI stuff (Popsicle sticks, cotton balls, balloons, paper clips, mailing labels, etc.) and had to create a new winter sport. They had 8 minutes to create the sport and plan a theatrical presentation about their new sport, the performance was to last 2 minutes. Their sport involved some type of downhill event with balloons, jumps, and goal post type things. I believe the sport was played by hamsters who were inside of their exercise balls (the balloon).
That is all for this week, next week the last meeting of 2008!
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Meeting #6 - 12/6/08
Our first meeting after the week off for Thanksgiving.
The team dove in and started brainstorming ideas for their main challenge. A big part of the challenge is making 3D set pieces that are the correct scale. Since the team is using bee's as their animal they will be building some huge set pieces. Using some of their advanced math skills they determined a bee hive would have to be about 50' tall and a blade of grass would have to be about 10' tall. They also brainstormed a variety of potential story lines including:
killer/normal bees
invasion of the bees
A day in the life of bees
bees and bears
attack of the bees
bees collection pollen
drama in a bees life
cell phones killing bees
The teams creativity slowed down a bit so we took a break and did an instant challenge. The first part of the challenge involved the team reenacting a scene from a Christmas show or special, it could be either real or imaginary. They chose the Grinch and reenacted the scene where the Grinch steals the Christmas Tree. They had 10 minutes to select the scene and rehearse their presentation. After presenting their presentation they had to do it over again in three different methods. For one method they had to reverse the good and bad characters, the Grinch became a "good" character and Cindy Lou became a "bad" character. Next they had to reenact the story which was written 51 years ago showing how it would be different in modern times. Finally they had to reenact the story with all of the characters very old. This is the version they had the most fun with. I took short videos of all of this but the team won't let me post them. However I did grab some stills from the videos and posted those so you can get a feel for the dramatic flair the team has!
After the instant challenge the team went back to working on the main challenge. The current concept involves two bee hives a "good" hive and an "evil" hive. After Christmas we will most likely start building set pieces - we will probably need a new location to do this, KI won't work well for this phase of the season. If anyone has a basement that would be up to the task and wouldn't mind us holding some meetings in their basement please let me know.
That's all for this week.
The team dove in and started brainstorming ideas for their main challenge. A big part of the challenge is making 3D set pieces that are the correct scale. Since the team is using bee's as their animal they will be building some huge set pieces. Using some of their advanced math skills they determined a bee hive would have to be about 50' tall and a blade of grass would have to be about 10' tall. They also brainstormed a variety of potential story lines including:
killer/normal bees
invasion of the bees
A day in the life of bees
bees and bears
attack of the bees
bees collection pollen
drama in a bees life
cell phones killing bees
The teams creativity slowed down a bit so we took a break and did an instant challenge. The first part of the challenge involved the team reenacting a scene from a Christmas show or special, it could be either real or imaginary. They chose the Grinch and reenacted the scene where the Grinch steals the Christmas Tree. They had 10 minutes to select the scene and rehearse their presentation. After presenting their presentation they had to do it over again in three different methods. For one method they had to reverse the good and bad characters, the Grinch became a "good" character and Cindy Lou became a "bad" character. Next they had to reenact the story which was written 51 years ago showing how it would be different in modern times. Finally they had to reenact the story with all of the characters very old. This is the version they had the most fun with. I took short videos of all of this but the team won't let me post them. However I did grab some stills from the videos and posted those so you can get a feel for the dramatic flair the team has!
After the instant challenge the team went back to working on the main challenge. The current concept involves two bee hives a "good" hive and an "evil" hive. After Christmas we will most likely start building set pieces - we will probably need a new location to do this, KI won't work well for this phase of the season. If anyone has a basement that would be up to the task and wouldn't mind us holding some meetings in their basement please let me know.
That's all for this week.
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