Interviewing Secratary of State Ed Balls

On Thursday 12th May Yasemin, Alex, Marley and I were invited to go to the department for education to interview the secretary of state Ed Balls. We went to interview him at guildhall a couple of months ago but he had to attend an important meeting so the date was postponed. We travelled there by taxi and the journey was nerve-racking. While we were there we managed to get a few shots of the building. It was massive! The building as modern and everything was made of glass. As Alex and Marley were stuck in traffic Yasemin and Fiona as well as I and Mr. Harpham were led up to the interviewing room where we began to set up. Unfortunately our planned room was going to be used in a meeting so we had to move last minute. We encountered a few problems on the way, which included

• Problems with lighting in the room
• Sound - for example the boom wasn't working so we had to use the built in microphone.

When we were finally ready the interview began

it was my job to be in charge of the sound but as the boom wasn’t working I just had to pretend like I knew what was going on :) we all introduced ourselves and he was very friendly.

He quickly discussed with us 'what we thought of the Diploma' and of course our response was great. Just before we started, Yasemin directed him and told him to answer in full sentences and to look in the right direction.

The overall interview worked very well and went smoothly. It was a great experience and you could tell we all enjoyed it.

Drama - Record Unit

In class we have been writing monologues as part of our unit "record". At first we were asked to create a character, then we had to brainstorm ideas about the character (e.g. how old they are, what are they doing whilst acting out the monologue). Once we did that we got into role, developed our characters further then started writing our own monologues. My idea was a schizophrenic fifteen year old girl. I got this idea from Hollyoaks, and the character newt. In my book, I decided to add stage directions to fit the style of Jessica my character. My role is based on the character 'newt' in Hollyoaks. He is a schizophrenic teenager. My role fits in with the character newt because they both have similar problems at home and they are both suffering from the same illness. If I perform my monologue I plan to perform it in 3 different areas:

• on location
• in the theatre
• in front of the green screen

As my two different mediums I’ve chosen to focus on photography and record. I’ve chosen these two because I’m not very good at performance and don’t feel comfortable on stage so I will be back stage doing the recording. I also picked photography because it’s what I want to do when I’m older so it would be good to have some experience. Also, because it covers media and that’s one of the subjects
For my monologue I've written everything but just need to do some more background research. I will go onto Wikipedia and other sources to find out about schizophrenia.

Art & Textiles - Campaign

In Class we have to put together a campaign in groups of 3-5. The campaign has to be on children's rights and it has to be inspired by one of the Unicef aims. (campaigns can be checked on www.unicef.org.uk) In our groups, we came up with the topic "health" and applied it in local and worldwide problems. Our worldwide problem was the lack of access to water & sanitation (which is one of the campaigns on the Unicef website) and our local problem was the right to be safe around others (which leads us onto our purple day).
We decided that its easier if we raise awareness to something local rather than worldwide because it applies to us more and people will be more interested in it.
We thought of the problems in our area and how it effects us.
We finally decided to do our raising awareness day on "knife crime" as its the most relevant to the area we live in and the problems going on around us.
As a fundraiser and a raising awareness day we decided to put posters up around the school and have a day where everyone comes in the colours purple & white.
We chose these two colours because they represent the messages peace, relaxation & loyalty.
as part of our planning, we have asked for a date to negotiate this with the head teacher so this day can actually take place in the nearby future. Within the next lesson, in our groups we had completed a brainstorm of:
• the tasks we would take on
• the people in our group
• our actual campaign
• the fundraiser we would hold
This brainstorm ws completed in our group and pictures of it ws taken. the pictures can be seen at the bottom of this post where i have made a slideshow.
In art we did a similar thing, we took a piece of work from rodchenko & popova each and changed it a bit so it fit our theme of campaign.
all of this will come together and complete our unit.

Final Identity Piece

In our last lesson to finish our identity projects, I was no way near half way through so I was literally PANICKING! I knew there was no way I would be able to finish it but I knew I had to do as much as possible.
These are the steps it took to make my identity piece:

1. screen print my face onto the tie dyed piece of fabric
2. block print the blotches onto the tie dyed piece of fabric
3. once that’s dry, staple the fabric onto the 1m by 1m frame I prepared earlier
4. Stick fabric around the edges of the frame to make it stand out and cover the staples.

In the end I managed to get up to stage 5 but I could only cover half of my frame. I’m hoping to complete it in time and get my grade higher. In those 4 lessons I think I got my artefact together quite well. The only thing I think didn’t turn out how I wanted to, was the screen print of my face because the picture wasn’t clear enough. It’s not something I could change unless I start the whole thing again so I will add that into my evaluation.

Final Woyzeck Performance

On Thursday 14th July & Friday 15th July we had our Woyzeck performance so we were in school for the whole day preparing for it. My job was the set designer. I think the last two days really helped us get everything together on the set because we had loads of little bits; it was just a matter of putting everything together. In the end we didn’t get to perform in front of our parents because we decided we weren’t ready yet. I’m quite happy that we didn’t perform actually because there were actors missing, and we definitely needed more time to practice. When we had put up the whole set I made sure that I helped other people and tidied up the floor as it was full of paper and selo-tape. In the end, we put up all the lights we bought from the cake sale money. It looked amazing once the lights were off. I think the whole class did a really good job seen as we only had 2 days; we really pulled it together even though I didn’t think we would do it. :)

These are a few work in progress pictures we took whilst rehearsing.

Cake Sale

In May our class decided to do a fundraiser for our Woyzeck performance. The money would go towards props, costumes and lighting. The day went really well and I found that I really did enjoy myself. Most of the class was there even though we decided that only a few people should be there. Everyone was really enthusiastic which was good. We decided to sell things like brownies, cookies, fairy cakes and little snacks like that. It was a hot day so we also decided to sell Oreo milkshakes and ice-cream. They sold out really fast which pleased me. We made a total of about £85 and £35 profit.

Bash Studios

On the 30th of June, me and my creative & media class went along to bash studio to help with the "First Date Widening career perspectives day." We all had little jobs to do and my particular job was front of house. This included keeping names of everyone who turned up and making sure the right people were there. Other people had the job of handing out snacks, filming interviews and taking pictures. After about an hour, all the volunteers and students had arrived and so it left me nothing to do. Instead, we went round to the volunteers and asked them the following questions:
Their NameTheir job title

• The company they work for
• What their job involves
• How did they get there
• Why would people want to do that job

By the end of the day we ended up talking to about 7 or 8 people with different jobs. It helped give me a basic idea of the sort of job opportunities there are out there and how to get involved.