Overview
For Homecoming every year, my high school ran a competition between grades to see who could build the best parade float.
I was the Class of 2020 float team lead, so it was my responsibility to lead the design, construction, and logistics of our float.
In 2017, we had made the mistake of trying to build something too complicated, which eventually doomed our chances of success.
My goal for 2018 was to design a float that was both simple enough to be reliable and interesting enough to win the competition
We ended up using our lifeguard theme to build a float of a lifeguard ship being eaten by a shark
Our float won the competition even though we weren’t seniors, a notable achievement.
Our finished float structure. By this point we had fully finished building all the wooden components and the mechanical movements.
One of the stipulations for a good float design was that it had to have human-powered motion but the humans could not be visible. So, we were forced to find creative ways (by building a false floor in this case) to hide the float workers.
Float Stuffing was, in a word, mayhem. We were given around 10 hours in total to fully stuff the entire float’s chicken wire with colored tissue paper.
This is when my organization/logistical skills shined brightest. It was my responsibility to make sure that things were filled with the right color, that we had people working on every component, and that we had enough of all the necessary materials.
I also had to make design decisions on the fly, like our truck skirt shown on the left. We couldn’t come up with a slogan that involved the numbers 2 and 0 for ages, but as float stuffing started, I just had to decide something for stuffers to put on it.