INTRODUCING OUR SEASON 6 PROTOSTARS!
Happy Monday – here's something cool and inspiring to start your week with! We're back for 2024 and have 30 new passion projects to welcome to the Proto-verse!
Last week, we welcomed 30 new projects to the Protostars galaxy!
This is our sixth cohort of Protostars, a microgrant program we started in 2021. Through Protostars, we give young people from AU/NZ $1,000 to work on their passion projects. We surround them with community, encourage them to build in public, and learn from their peers as they create their projects for eight weeks.
Keep reading to learn about the 30 new passion projects we’ve welcomed to the Protostars universe!
👾 STEM Projects
Robbie Kinnaird is a spatial design student from Aotearoa. He is developing an indie game that simulates pre-colonial Aotearoa from the perspective of the extinct giant flightless bird native to the country, the Moa.
“My passion project is a simulated ecosystem built based on research into the ecology of Aotearoa New Zealand; when it was a truly isolated land without land mammals, populated by huge birds such as the Haast’s Eagle and Moa.
My idea is for it to be a foundation for future video games set in NZ, as I think there’s a huge amount of potential for particularly Māori history to be adapted to an immersive digital medium. It’s my own foray into learning key creative coding principles. The sim is being developed using Godot Engine 4, an open-source game engine, and I’m keeping a devlog on Tumblr and Instagram to share art, history, collaborative discussion and code tidbits week-to-week.
I want something polished and ready to run as an alpha release by the end of the 8 weeks, but there will always be room for the scope of a project like this to expand so this project will continue in my spare time in the future!”
🔊 Annie Rogers, 16, owns two companies and is developing 'My Voice', a Bluetooth speaker necklace. It aims to enhance eye contact for nonverbal individuals by projecting their voice from their chest.
🌾 Lutjen Lee, a final-year law student, is developing ‘Farmbite’, an online marketplace for trading locally grown home and farm produce.
🤖 Parambir Singh, a final-year engineering student, is working on a machine-learning project using hyperspectral cameras and drones to provide real-time insights into crop conditions.
🗑️ Jed Hoo is a UI designer and computer science student. His passion project is called ‘PureSort’ – a smart bin that automates waste sorting and compacts waste at the same time.
🥾 Catriona Savage, an industrial design student, is creating 'Stride Boot', a modular, sustainable recovery boot for people with ankle and foot injuries.
📱 Prabhjot Sodhi, a computer science student, is creating an app using machine learning to analyse food products by scanning barcodes, ingredient lists, or product photos.
🌐 Dhananjay Rathore, a 3D artist and medical student, is working on a passion project to develop an augmented reality experience in Wellington.
📱 Daniel Duong is creating a role-player financial literacy game app to help young people struggling with finances.
🌐 Bradley Cox and Jason Zhong's 'Exam Insights' addresses the scarcity of centralised educational resources. Since its 2023 pilot, it's served 3000 users in 200 Queensland schools.
📱 Chloe Youngman is developing 'Hiya', an app to help creatives easily present their work to potential employers using visual-based swipecards.
🤝 Community and Social Impact Projects
Liam Hansen is an Auckland-based print editor, writer and creator. Last season, their passion project was SPECK Comics, and this time, they’re expanding beyond its zine roots and experimenting with the intersections between events, music and media. This season, Liam aims to host a series of underground concerts, bringing together local bands and animators/artists to create a cross between a gig and an art exhibition.
“Taking inspiration from larger musical acts like Porter Robinson, we'll pair up musical artists with illustrators and animators to create stage visuals that respond to the music such as short animated loops that change between each song. This will provide spaces for the arts community to further intersect with each other, bringing the other arts together and allowing smaller artists the opportunity to experiment with a strange hybrid of a gig, art exhibition, and film festival. It'll be weird and really cool.”
🎶 Jarrod Iaria's passion project, Playground, will offer web-hosted music education tools for accessible electronic music production, beginning with virtual instruments.
🍽️ Amanda Kusuma and Carlos Melegrito’s passion project, Acts of Service, is a themed supper club that connects people through good food, curated experiences, and meaningful storytelling.
🌐 Annie Liao is working on the Build Club, a free campus in Australia for young people to connect and work on their side projects and passions.
🧩 Amy Miedema's 'Kiwi Quest' is a New Zealand-themed board game promoting Aotearoa's history, culture, and Te Reo Māori learning through trivia questions and visiting iconic landmarks.
🧶 Miu Vong's passion project, 'Crochet Away', aims to educate people about plastic waste and at the same time teach them to crochet.
🃏 Christian Huang is creating a playing card set aimed at raising mental health awareness. Proceeds go to the Blackdog Institute, and the cards encourage open conversations about mental health.
🎭 Arts Projects
Buddy Malbasias is a Brisbane based movement artist expanding his movement composition project, Bugas, and hopes to tour it across Australia, the Philippines, and develop a feature film centred on the work.
“Bugas - translating to “milled rice” in Bisaya – is an introspective movement composition that intricately interrogates and weaves themes of duality, hierarchy and the complexities of the human experience. A clever play on the Filipino word "bukas," translating to "tomorrow,” a dystopian unknown world emerges, where choreographed movement sections seamlessly intertwined with expressive vocal work, challenges the choreographer, dancers and the audience.
Bugas takes a literal and metaphorical approach. In its literal form, the work delves into the significance of rice through an immigrant lens, portraying this small grain as a vessel holding a nostalgic past with themes of power and corruption. Metaphorically, the work urges viewers to cultivate a deeper understanding of their own perspectives, influences and positions in the world. Bugas, doubling as slang for "pimple” - an overproduction and build-up of bacteria over time, culminating in a satisfying release – draws a poignant parallel. The performance conceptually creates a dynamic interplay of tension and sudden freeing liberation, showcasing just one of the countless ways the interplay between opposing themes unfolds throughout our lives.
This exploration delves into the fundamental aspects of our existence; our raw essence and core identity. In the same way people digest food uniquely, Bugas invites audiences to reflect on their personal engagement with the performance, encouraging a metaphorical digestion of the work as varied and nuanced as our diversity in life.”
🎨 Gretel Tobin, an artist and environmental educator, is collaborating with her partner Joshua to create a community mural inspired by the local environment using texture and color.
📸 Hameed Akinwande's passion project, "Let the Boys Play," is a photobook showcasing childhood freedom, aiming to raise men's mental health awareness, with part of the proceeds supporting youth clubs.
🎬 Vidhi Vira is a filmmaker whose passion project is The Long F*cking Road – a film that explores the need for connection between sisters, loss and communicating the fear of losing everything that you have left.
🎭 Eliva Andriamora is an actor, writer and playwright of FAT, BLACK & UGLY – a one person theatre piece and play. The story centres around a girl starved of love, riddled with self-hate, who finds healing through radical truth and honesty.
🎶 Ayda Akbal’s passion project is Where Do I Belong Here?, an original album exploring what it means to grow up as a first-generation Turkish-Australian. Through piano composition and vocal performance, the album will explore the nuances of growing up as a woman and only child.
🎭 Louie O'Carroll is developing 'My Love', an abstract queer theatre show about a lesbian couple solving murders, featuring drag, reality TV style interviews, and physical theatre, accessible to regional and rural audiences.
🎤 Media and Storytelling Projects
Donald Mackenzie-Mayo is a recently graduated medical doctor whose passion project is Cheap Whines – a podcast and multimedia series created in collaboration with his mates, Zazi Hewlett and Felix Walton. The series explores politics in Aotearoa from a youth perspective and aims to give agency and clarity to young people.
“At the podcast’s core is our generation’s shared fear that nothing we do makes a difference and we’re all totally screwed. We hope to wrestle with the feeling so many of us have that politics is a waste of time and our “representatives” never represent us, anyway.
We instead want to make both political issues and the people who control our systems accessible to young people, by exploring them in an environment and tone Gen Z will actually connect with! The goal isn’t to be high-minded, but to help young people reconnect with a political landscape they feel has left them behind - without seeming saccharine or artificial.”
🎤 Vira Paky, a Congolese-Kiwi storyteller and activist, will amplify the visibility of the Black diaspora in the Asia-Pacific through her project, The Black Oceania Collective, using digital and multimedia platforms.
🎬 Zac Perry's passion project, Praxis Pictures, is a film production company focusing on diverse Australian narratives. In 2023, they completed a 4 x 15-minute web-series SPACE RATS, and short films TINT, OF A WOMAN, BLUEBIRD and CAT’S EYE.
🧑⚖️ Maria Angela Strolla’s passion project is a multimedia content series that aims to demystify and make learning about the law fun and accessible. Inspired by the likes of Shameless and The Daily Aus, she hopes her project will give people the tools and literacy to make their own informed decisions on legal and justice related issues.
🤝 Max Tassell, an actor and director, is undertaking a project exploring rural Australian towns and the Catholic Church. He'll travel from Melbourne to Sydney, writing about his experiences, and transform these into a play.