Saturday 31 May 2014

Piano concert


At a concert last October, our star pianist Kelly Kwok performed Robert Schumann's Papillons and Alberto Ginastera's Danzas Argentinas for us. She was then joined by her friend Vanessa Wat, who sang Somewhere from the Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim musical West Side Story.


Filmed by Mr Karena

Wednesday 28 May 2014

First impressions


Here's a short interview with Joe Littler and Kenny Jeong, done on the day of our Opening Ceremony back in September. It was one of a series of chats with students in their dorms filmed by one of our governors, Alex Tancock, for possible use in the film he was compiling to celebrate CIS Hong Kong's 30th Anniversary this year. [You can watch the finished film here. This didn't make it into the final edit, but a lot of Hangzhou footage did.]

Although they had only been here a week or two by this point, they already seem to have formed some powerfully positive impressions of the place. (No teachers bribed them to say this - honestly!)

And gosh - they look young in this! These two guys have grown up a lot this year.



Filmed by Alex Tancock


Saturday 24 May 2014

All you knead is love


During the Shanghai Music Trip - one of this year's 'Project Week' offerings for CIS Hangzhou students - our intrepid group of musicians (Kelly Kwok, Jessie Gao, Vanessa Wat, and JJ Cheng, accompanied by Director of Music Tama Karena, Julia Hsieh, and Aydee Tie) took a morning off to visit a bakery. Jessie seems to have more of an aptitude for working with dough than Mr K! But perhaps it was more of an exercise in percussion than baking....


Filmed by Aydee Tie

Wednesday 21 May 2014

Early impressions of Hangzhou


On the last of our three days of 'orientation' at the start of the year, we ventured out into Hangzhou for the first time - to spend a day hiking around Xihu, the famous West Lake (and we were blessed with particularly glorious weather for the expedition).


Ciara Jacob created this nice photo montage of the day out (with a little bit of video too: Gloria Schiavo gives a potted history of the Leifeng Pagoda).


Tuesday 20 May 2014

Slapstick


For their first 'challenge shoot' in the Film class this year, students were briefed to go out and create a short reel of simple stunts or sight gags. This was really just to let them have a bit of fun while becoming familiar with how to use the cameras; but the clips they produced lent themselves well to having enhanced sound effects added in later - using the dark art of Foley. Jasper Ng, Hayson Chu, and David Zhang produced one of the best efforts on this.


Filmed by David Zhang, edited by Jasper Ng


Saturday 17 May 2014

Busking


During the Shanghai Music Trip - one of our 'Project Week' activities at the end of March - our students took some time out to go busking in a park. Here are JJ Cheng, Vanessa Wat, Kelly Kwok and Jessie Gao (joined by Coach Mentor Aydee Tie) singing the standard Fly Me to the Moon (words and music by Bart Howard).


Filmed by Mr Karena


Thursday 15 May 2014

Getting noticed

Big thanks to Mandy Ng in the school's PR department down in Hong Kong for arranging to link this site to the CIS Hangzhou website! We now have two links from there, one on the homepage (down near the bottom of the righthand sidebar, just beneath the handsome picture of Jeffrey Lam)....


.... and one slightly more prominent one on the Hangzhou News page (next to Mr Pratt's weekly bulletins)....





Thanks also to Rosh Harjani, the administrator of the school's Moongate portal, who has given us an icon of our own in the 'Spotlight' box at the top right of the homepage (although you have to have your 'widgets' option activated in order to see this view of the site).




Hopefully, this improved interconnectedness between our school's various online information channels will slowly gather more attention for our little video blog here from the wider CIS community and beyond.


Tuesday 13 May 2014

Hangzhou's Bagua Tian


One of the groups on our Maths-led Inter-Disciplinary Experience (IDE) at the start of April - (Philosopher!) Charlie Salnikow, Jasper Ng, Gloria Schiavo, Jeffrey Chak Long Lam, Abi Yee and Joe Littler - created this film about their experiences at Hangzhou's unusual tourist attraction, the Bagua Tian: a group of fields arranged in the form of Taoism's 八卦, the 'Eight Symbols'.


Filmed and edited by Joe Littler


Sunday 11 May 2014

The demonstrators


Our last Cotillion of the year last night brought back a lot of happy memories of previous evenings in this more-or-less monthly series of dances, which have been kindly arranged by Mr and Mrs Jooris.

Our regular host Axel Leven and his good friend Fin McCombe always seem to get 'volunteered' to demonstrate the dance steps - perhaps because they are the best sports rather than necessarily the best dancers. Here, they're having a go at the tango...


Filmed by Mr Murphy


Friday 9 May 2014

Hangzhou Weekly News - 9th May 2014



Another weekly bulletin from CIS Hangzhou - this time giving us a brief behind-the-scenes glimpse of the school Choir gearing up for an end-of-year performance. And the enormous task of taking everyone's photo for the CIS Hangzhou Yearbook continues....


Filmed and edited by Jasmine Topp and Sierra Chiao


Wednesday 7 May 2014

Chinese Opera


On an improbably warm Sunday afternoon at the start of December, the Chinese Department led the whole school on an excursion to nearby Huanglong Park, where there are regular matinee performances of excerpts from the local Kunqu style of Chinese opera. The genre is enormously popular with senior citizens, but doesn't seem to appeal to a younger audience any more. Nevertheless, our students seemed to find it an interesting experience.

This is just a very brief glimpse of one performance. There may be more to follow in a little while.



Filmed by Mr Murphy


Monday 5 May 2014

Shanghai Music Week


For the CIS Hangzhou 'Project Week' at the end of March this year, a small group of musicians - Kelly Kwok, JJ Cheng, Jessie Gao, and Vanessa Wat (accompanied by our Director of Music, Tama Karena, and Ms Hsieh and Aydee Tie) - went to Shanghai, to explore the city's diverse music scene... and to meet the challenge of composing a school song.


Filmed and edited by Aydee Tie


Sunday 4 May 2014

A taiji demonstration


Many of our students have been taking taiji classes on Sunday afternoons throughout the year with Master Wang and Master Zhang, two leading exponents of the Chen family style who teach for the Taiji Zen organisation (founded by Jet Li and Jack Ma), which recently opened a centre here in Hangzhou. 

Back in October, Zhang shifu kindly agreed to let us film him giving a complete demonstration of the foundational sequence of movements - the 'Eight Forms' of the Chen style - which the whole school endeavoured to learn in an introductory series of taiji lessons at the start of the year.



Filmed by Nick Berry and Hannah Hui

[We shot the sequence twice, with two cameras at 90° to one another, so that we had all-around views: from the front, the left, the back, and the right. There's also a sequence Mr Murphy shot a couple of weeks earlier of our other teacher, Wang shifu, performing the same routine, but in failing light. However, the routine is more readily digestible in this single clip of Zhang shifu which Nick Berry edited together.]


Friday 2 May 2014

Hangzhou Weekly News - 2nd May 2014


The weekly bulletin from CIS Hangzhou, prepared for inclusion in our parent school's regular video roundup of 'Friday Morning News'. In this May Week instalment, some of our students discuss their hopes and plans for the last few weeks of our school year here in Hangzhou - including making a Yearbook, a literary magazine.... and lots of new friends.


Filmed and edited by Sierra Chiao and Jasmine Topp