Murder, greed, corruption, exploitation, adultery and treachery…all those things we hold near and dear to our hearts AKA the roaring 1920's or Bugsy Malone

Murder, Greed, Corruption, Exploitation, Adultery and Treachery. The roaring 1920s/1930's was a time of glitz, glamour, and all that Jazz. An era in which many famous musicals such as Chicago, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, or Bugsy Malone were set. The 1920s/30s was a time of flappers, crime, illegal smuggling of drugs, the birth of the silver screen, flagpole sitting, the Great Depression, gangsters, the Charleston, and again, most importantly, all that jazz.


The musical that we are doing for Passion Projects this year is Bugsy Malone. Bugsy Malone is a 1976 musical gangster film, written and directed by Alan Parker. This movie musical tells the story of Bugsy Malone, and the battle of power between rival gang leaders, Fam Sam Stacetto and Dandy Dan. Set in the late 1920s/early1930s, this movie stars an all children cast, including actors such as Jodie Foster, Scott Baio, John Cassisi and Martin Lev. The glamorous cast include, our main character Bugsy Malone, the hero of the story, Blousey Brown, a force to be reckoned with, Fat Sam Stacetto, worst of the bad guys, Tallulah, the classic showgirl/gangsters moll, Dandy Dan, the rival gang leader and businessman, and a whole lot of others. Instead of real guns being used in the film, there are splurge guns that shoot our whipped cream and creampies instead of bullets as well! I really enjoyed watching the film and stage production of Bugsy Malone, it really does show that being a gangster is a childish act and that you can end up with cream on your face!


This week, the musical theatre crew for this year have started working on this year's production. The teachers that are working with us this year are Mrs Beer, Miss Richardson (Mrs Handley), Mrs Clark, Mr Taylor, and finally Miss Jordan. All of these teachers have had numerous years of experience and we have so much to learn from each and every one of them. I am familiar with all of the teachers except Miss Jordan who is our great lighting/stage technician but soon enough I will be familiar with her too!



Monday the 12th of November 2018

Here is me as Scar last year

Our first musical theatre session! Every Monday, we have three periods of classes dedicated to our passion projects. Since some people weren't very familiar with the musical Bugsy Malone, the teachers decided to show us the stage production. Since our show is going to be more like the stage production, we weren't shown the movie. While watching the stage production, we were encouraged to take some notes of characters we wanted to play in the show etc. Being quite familiar with the musical, I knew exactly who I wanted to play... FAT SAM STACETTO. If you checked out my blog posts from last year, you will know that I played Scar last year in our production in the Lion King. The characters that I like to play are the evil characters or the "villains". There is something so amazing about playing evil characters that I can't describe! I love being intimidating.



After watching the stage production, Miss Richardson (or Mrs Handley) took us outside to teach us a warm-up routine that we would be doing every session. The warm-up is to the song "Covergirl" by my favourite drag star RuPaul. Being in Miss Richardson's music class came in handy that session because we already learned it during some of the lessons we had! That dance routine requires sass and multitasking. Here is a short video of our crew doing it. By doing this routine at the start of our sessions, we are warmed up to do any further dancing throughout the sessions.

Heres our gorgeous crew! 

Shorty after dancing, we had a read through of the script. While doing the read through, I was reading the role of Bronx Charlie, one of Dandy Dans gang members. While doing this, Mrs Beer and Miss Richardson were holding singing auditions for singing characters. Although I didn't sign up for a singing character, Mrs Beer and Miss Richardson wanted me to audition anyway so that I might have the chance to have a singing part if I got a named character. The song that I sang was "Roxie" from another musical set in the 1920's called Chicago. Soon it was the end of the day. When I got home, I immediately started to watch the movie so I could further my understanding of the plot and characters.


Thursday the 15th November 2018
Our second session of Musical Theatre was jam-packed! On Thursdays, we have the whole day to work on our passion projects. The start of our lesson was extremely fun! When we arrived in the whare, our new station for the day, we saw Miss Richardson, working hard already, dancing her heart out. Meagan, Molly and I started to join in. Covergirl is a very iconic song in our friend group, so we were all singing our lungs out! After we danced to Covergirl, we started to dance to our newly learned dance to "Five More Hours" by Chris Brown. What an energetic dance with even more energetic dance moves! Soon after we were all warmed up. Mrs Beer was announcing all of the cast members roles. I was so excited to learn who my role was. Soon enough, I was told that my role was FAT SAM STACETTO! I was so happy, I got the character that I wanted. I was so excited to learn that most of my friends got the roles that they wanted as well!


Soon after we were told our roles, we had a full readthrough as our characters. I read all my lines the best that I could. There was one line that I particularly love, it is "(Shouting) THEN STAND AGAINST THE WALL, PORRIDGE BRAIN. RITZY, HAND ME A PIE". The reason I love this line is that I get to yell at whoever is Louis. In this particular scene, Fat Sam is starting to get angry at his gang because they keep on getting outsmarted by Dandy Dan's gang. During this readthrough, everyone became more comfortable with their roles.

The readthrough continued to period 2. Straight after Interval, we started to work on our blogging. The teachers then showed some examples of good blogging, and one of my previous posts from last year was on there. Shortly after that, we were shown our blogging tasks that we had to do. Then the musical theatre gang was soon split up into groups so we were able to do different workshops. Most of the named characters went to an accent workshop with Mr Taylor, a self-taught vocalist. Since our Musical is set in New York, it would make sense for most of the characters to have a New York accent. We began the workshop with slowly learning about how the New Yorkans drop their R's and have a very distinct accent. Soon as we started to grow a little more confident in our new accents we had a short readthrough so everyone had the chance to practice our accents. Soon after that, we tried to have conversations in our accents. It was really strange, but we managed to develop them to somewhat sound like a person from New York.


After lunch, it was time to work on the first big ensemble number; Fat Sams Grand Slam! This song is about Fat Sams place; the liveliest joint in town! We spent the last period of the day working on learning the lyrics (not that I needed to) and keeping in tune. We didn't do too bad for a group of people that are just getting to know the song and the lyrics!

My Character Profile! 

Full name: Sam Stacetto

Age: He is a tween in the movie, but in our production, I think he will be a little older than that. Age range around 20-22

Most Common Emotion: Fat Sams most common emotion is anger. But with the group of people that are in his gang, can you blame him?

Physical Characteristics: The Fat Sam that I am going to portray has quite an intimidating gait. When he walks, everyone is silent. His gait is slow, allowing everyone to absorb his essence. While talking to someone, he makes numerous hand gestures and points his fingers at anyone to make sure that they are listening. Fat Sam stands tall and has a booming voice that everyone listens to.

Fears: As seen as quite obvious in the film, Fat Sam fears that Dandy Dan will take everything he has. 

Early life: Sam was brought up as one of the down and outs, he spent most of his young life alone. Born in the Bronx, Fat Sam never knew his parents, hence is tough exterior, but he truly has a heart and feelings. The leader of his gang, Fat Sam built himself from nothing.

Important relationships within the cast: One of Sams important relationships is with Tallulah, his girlfriend if you will. During the musical, Fat Sams shows a relationship with Bugsy Malone. Bugsy ends up working for Fat Sam during the show and their friendship grows stronger as the musical goes on.

An inspiration for the character: Miranda Priestly from the Devil Wears Prada could be seen as an inspiration for my take on Fat Sam. She is a force to be reckoned with and can be very intimidating. That is kind of what I am going for with my fat Sam Character. Another person that could inspire my Fat Sam character is the notorious Crime Boss Al Capone. The only reason I say that is because he kind of looks like what I would imagine Fat Sam to look like!

Opshop: NOT THE SHOP... THE BAND

This is my assortment of Canvas that will inform you about the New Zealand band Opshop and who they are. Made on Canva.com

Know Your Rights

As a consumer, it is very important to know your rights. Your job as a consumer is to know your rights to ensure that you do not buy a faulty product, pay more than you intend to. There are many rules and regulations regarding products. The Fair Trading Act is an exceptional example of this, it protects consumers from purchasing faulty or falsely advertised products, it also protects consumers when they have purchased a faulty product. For example, if you buy a desk with a missing drawer, if it fits the policy, you have the right to get a full refund or another model of the same desk. If the producer refuses to do this then you have the right to take them to court or report them, unless it states in their policy that they do not accept refunds or swaps. Knowing your rights as a consumer can protect you from any problems with producers in the future.

The Rights Of Consumers and Responsibility Of Producers

The fair trading act protects consumers from misleading or deceptive behaviour from traders.
The act protects consumers from false claims about what the product is. It deals with unfair contract terms,
product safety and even where it comes from. The Commerce Commission also deals with sales and promotion. The Commerce Commission's main goal is to play their part in ensuring that markets work
properly so consumers and businesses are confident in the marketplace. The consumer is responsible for
the act, if the act isn’t being followed, the consumers can also take their own legal action. But the act applies
to both the producers and consumers. If there is misleading or deceptive behaviour being shown by the
producers, the consumers will be protected by the Fair Trading Act.

The Act of Compliance of obligations applies to both the consumers and the producers. However, the obligation does not apply to consumers that intend to get a refund after they deliberately used it all up or ruined it in some way. On the other hand, if you buy a faulty product and try to return it, it is the producer's obligation to either refund the product or give you the same model of the product. In most cases, stores have a returns policy, and if the policy doesn’t apply to the product, you are not protected by the policy. The producers must put their feet in the shoes of the consumers. The business would have to consider the consumers and what they would want and how they would want it to be presented. The commission's job is to investigate the allegations of a producer and to enforce the Fair Trading Act. In conclusion, the Act of Compliance of obligations applies to both the producers and consumers in different ways.

When reporting a business you can go to a range of different sites such as https://comcom.govt.nz and report a business through their complaint form or you could call them through this phone number, 0800 943 600 or email contact@comcom.govt.nz with your concerns about a certain business or producer.

Is it illegal to do this, we're talking about killing pests here...

Ok so maybe I exaggerated in the title, but can you blame me? We were figuring out ways to kill pests. This week marks the start of our Business and Enterprise unit. Our class has been working on projects focused around innovating environmental issues that New Zealand is currently facing. For the past few weeks we have been doing a project that required us to use investigative research and practical knowledge of science, technology and business to design and prototype a solution to the challenge. Doing this project required us to use our Science, Technology, Social Science and English skills to get the best product we could. 


At the start of this process, we divided our class into teams of four. I worked with Molly, Jess and Connor. Then Mr Carter gave out pieces of paper with the different challenges on them. Our group decided to do the Protection from Pests challenge. At first, our group had a hard time choosing the challenge because we had to consider how challenging they were. At the start, I wanted to do the Careers and Capability challenge which was coming up with a way to encourage youth to do more agricultural work. But then my group pointed out that it might be too challenging, which I didn't agree with but then we agreed on doing the Protection from Pests challenge. Our challenge was to create a way to improve New Zealand’s biosecurity and protect the country from harmful invasions of plant and animal pests. We thought that this challenge was challenging enough. Our group decided to do this challenge because we wanted to do something challenging. This challenge seemed like something that our group could all add something to.

The next thing we did was research, now at the start, we focused our research on plants that could cause potential harm to the country. But this didn't really get us anywhere because it didn't impact our final product. But then we started to realise that we had to look at pests of animal form. We started to investigate how pests are currently taken care of, most of it was poisoning. This information helps us figure out how we were going to innovate the way that pests are taken care of. Once we finished researching the way pests were taken care of, we went on to research robots and how they could potentially help us create a product. 

After this, we started to choose our enablers. Enablers are the main things that are going to be incorporated in the product. This part was challenging for our group because we weren't really sure what we wanted to make at that point. But we did research further into the enablers and found the ones that would best suit our challenge and final product. The challenging part of this task was actually only choosing two, our group had so many ideas that it was so hard to choose only two enablers. In the end, our group decided to use Stem Cell Science and Robots, I'm glad we chose these enablers because they worked out really good in the final product. 

Once we chose our enablers, our next challenge was to brainstorm ideas. This part was my favourite because we got to use our creativity to come up with a product. Our group was great at creating ideas for our product. This task was where our group worked as a team the most, we were all contributing and putting our ideas forward. Our first ideas were to create nanotechnology that can go through inanimate objects and scan through the bacteria and make the right decision about whether the bacteria should be there or not. Another idea was to build another robot prototype for the airports. They would have been able to scan bags as well as people as they walk through a programmed gate, the gate also would have scanned for bacteria and other banned substances. We had another idea that included building robots that looked like pests that could gather information about the pest and its behaviour. We decided on another idea, Olaf… Olaf is an acronym for Opposing, Living pests, Attacking, Functional, Structures. Olaf is a small robot that would be able to manoeuvre around the forestry in New Zealand. There would be multiple robots around the Country, specifically where native animals are, and there would be charging stations hidden so the robots would get enough charge to last as long as it needs. There would also be control towers placed around the country allowing information about the pests to be put on a database on every pest. The simple design would have 6 micro cameras that will scan and get more information on that pest and it will send it back. We will then study what is the weakness and strengths so that we will know how to attack and take down the pest. It was hard to incorporate the enablers into Olaf, but we managed to do it. Using stem cell science we will be able to create a database full of bacteria found in pests and harmful plants. This database will then allow O.L.A.F.S to be able to scan for these bacterias and identify them while in the wild. The use of robots means that we can create something that will be able to survive in the wild and be small enough to scan for bacteria even in the most dangerous environments.  This also means we can leave in the wild and not worry about it, if something were to happen it’ll send a signal control centre. The blue circles on both of the ends are the wheels that will be able to outstand any bumps in the forest or wherever the robot is based. The Cylinder-like thing in the middle is where a camera and information scanner will be. All of the information will be processed and then sent to the control centre. The robot will have the technology that can withstand the wildlife and not break down or stop working. This robot took a lot of thinking to come up with.

After we came up with our idea, we decided to design prototypes for our great robot. Connor is a whiz with technology so we decided to let him handle most of the technical design. Our design was inspired by Sphero Ollie, which is quite similar but our design looks better in my opinion. We think that this design will hold up in tough weather conditions. Our group used tinkercad.com to design Olaf. 

Our final part of this process was to create a presentation to showcase our ideas and the process we went through to get our final product. Our group made two presentations, one on google slides that we used for just our group to read out as we presented and the other presentation was created on Prezi.com that we used to show our class. (sphero ollie above) Overall our presentation went well, the class was respectful and we presented okay. Our group had to come up with a business name and ours was Elsa robotics because, in frozen the movie, Elsa created Olaf. So we thought that was quite a smart play on the movie! This is actually a real competition where you actually build the prototype. Who knows, our group might just do it? Here is the link to our presentation Click this link to check it out!

The experience of doing this challenge was quite enjoyable, it let us explore our own creativity and allowed us to do something that we might not have done before. Our group worked really well together and we all contributed. Our presentation was great and we weren't too nervous. 

This experience I gained knowledge on how to work as a team and create an effective product. I learned that when you disagree on something, it can be tough to figure out a way to fix it, but in the end. I also learned that sometimes it can be tough working with your mates. 

Please comment below on what you think about this challenge and if you would do it yourself. Until next time... 

Traditional Maori Medicine

For Social Studies, our class has been learning about early European settlement in New Zealand. I have learned about traditional Maori Medicine and all of the many aspects of it. I also have learned about traditional Maori cloaks. I never realised how amazing the Maori culture was until I research further and deeper into the parts of culture that I never even considered looking at. Digging deeper into my countries history has been a great experience, I think that learning about your countries origin and how it works is very important!  Here is the link to the video of Molly, Connor and I talking about Maori medicine... https://www.wevideo.com/view/1191081226
I made two piktocharts about Maori medicine and about Maori cloaks. The Maori cloaks piktochart somehow deleted, thank goodness I had a backup slide!