Meeting #9 - 12/12/07

Our second to last meeting before Christmas. The entire meeting was spent planning the main challenge. Working on ideas for the optical illusion, the revealer set pieces, and the secret that has to be revealed as part of the story. Much was accomplished but much still remains. Assignments were given to each team member, they are to bring their items to next weeks meeting so the team can stay on schedule. If we are as far as I hope we are after the next meeting we will probably start some longer weekend meetings after the holidays.

The team has stated their goal is to go to state and possibly beyond this year. To help them with this goal I plan to be more critical of things this season than I have been in the past. If I think their solutions don't make sense or are not as good as they could be I'm going to tell them. I won't interfere (I take that rule very seriously) but I will try to help them not settle for the first thing they decide on.

I had a fun holiday instant challenge planned for today but we just ran out of time so I will save it for next week. We'll start with the instant challenge next week so we are sure to fit it in. Please try to get your student to school on time so we can get started right away.

Don't forget our upcoming meeting schedule. Next week (12/19) will be our last meeting of the year. Meetings will resume Wednesday January 2nd at 7:30am.

The pictures from this week attempt to capture the thinking of the team. Here are the assignments for next week.

Write Script - Katie/Erin
Plan Costumes - Corrin
Sets Designs - Tamera/Corrin
Design Revealer Pieces - Klayton/Thalia
Optical Illusions Design - Austin

I'm not sure how Corrin ended up with two things, maybe she and Tamera can work on costumes and sets together.

Please remind your DI'er what they committed to work on for next week.

That's all for this week.

Meeting #8 - 12/5/07

We started the meeting with a quick little warm up exercise. Popsicle sticks were arranged in a math equation reading 1+1=6. The challenge is to move one Popsicle stick to make the equation true. There is one "right" answer and several other answers that also work. The team hit on a couple of the answers right away and eventually got all of the known solutions.

Next we moved on to working on the main challenge. After some bizarre departures from their original idea involving wallpaper stores the skeleton of the story started to take shape. The team began laying out the general outline for the story and started to identify the main elements of the challenge and possibly even identified one of the two required side trips.

The pictures I added to the album this week are relatively boring, mainly just capturing the ideas we wrote on the board. Next week we'll continue working on the overall story and probably do one quick Instant Challenge. My goal for the team is for them to have the story roughed out enough by the holidays so they can start working on sets, detailed script writing, and rehearsing after the holidays.