Wednesday 22 July 2015

Signing off....


I have had GREAT FUN establishing and maintaining this blog over the past 15 months, but... I have to say, I feel disappointed in it: by the aims I initially set for it, this project has been a failure

It was my hope that this 'TV Station' might be curated largely or entirely by students; but in fact 80% or 90% of the posted videos have been produced by me - and most of the student-produced ones have originated from my Film classes. With the packed schedule we create for students at CIS Hangzhou, they simply don't have the time for many self-initiated projects of this sort.




Perhaps that may change next year. Perhaps my very capable successor as Head of Film, Zhu Gesha, who I introduced on here yesterday, will be able to energise and inspire some of her students to take over this blog and develop their own content for it.

However, it is not reasonable to expect that Gesha herself will be able to curate the blog, as she is on a part-time contract with us, paid only for the small number of hours she will teach... whereas I have often been devoting 5-10 hours a week - and occasionally a lot more!! - to this enterprise.




I fear it is quite likely that this blog will be mothballed from here on. If this proves to be the case, I hope it will have some lasting value as a record and a celebration of the remarkable things that the students and staff here at CIS Hangzhou achieved during the school's first two years of existence.




So long, and thanks for watching.   

Paul Murphy
Outgoing Head of English and Film
CIS Hangzhou



Tuesday 21 July 2015

My successor

A Hangzhou local, Ms Zhu Gesha, is taking over my Film classes from me next year. She is a very bright and capable young lady, and she is far more technically knowledgeable about the medium than I am, having completed a Master's degree in documentary filmmaking at the University of Belfast a few years ago. 

This is one of the most impressive of her student projects, a prize-winning short feature called Reflection. Gesha sat in on a few of my classes towards the end of the year, and I persuaded her to show this film to my current students - who were duly impressed by her creative sensitivity, displayed here not only by the beautifully composed pictures but by the poetic simplicity of the narration. 

I think I'm leaving my legacy in good hands.

Sunday 19 July 2015

More on China Grassroots Football


The best of this year's Film class documentary projects was this profile of our collaboration with China Grassroots Football - around ten of our students regularly leading football coaching sessions at a local primary school in a special 'Little Teachers' programme they have created with us as one of our Community & Service activities. CGF founder Trevor Lamb displays his passion for 'the beautiful game' and explains the impact he believes it can have on children in China.

This film was made before Christmas, and I had meant to post it some time ago... but we seemed to have had rather too many posts about CGF (!!), so I kept putting it off...




Filmed by Daniel Carolan and Austin Lam; edited and sub-titled by Jasmine Savage



Saturday 18 July 2015

Project Week trip to the Fawang Temple


The Songshan region of Henan province is famous as the home of the Shaolin style of martial arts. For CIS Hangzhou's 'Project Week' in May this year, twelve of our students and three members of staff visited Da Fawang Si, one of the few Buddhist temples there that still runs a traditional kung fu school for its young trainee monks. It is also the only temple school which admits outsiders to study.

This trip was originally conceived and planned by Pierre Biret, our French teacher and also a keen martial artist; however, when he had to return to France at the start of the year, I inherited responsibility for organising it. Unfortunately, a serious foot injury prevented me from accompanying the trip; after seeing all the video shot of the experience, I am even more sorry to have missed out on it!

The participating students were Ingrid Tsang, Lauren Justice, Katherine Ye, Natalie Chak, Flora Xiao, Samantha Koo, Frances Amos, Andy Ji, Fenton Garvie, Timothy Chan, Yew San Cheah, and Vinay Hirani; the accompanying members of staff were Mark Tang, Eric Vallone, and Kuang Wen.



A short film of our group's shifu for the week demonstrating a sequence of fundamental practice movements can be seen here.




Filmed by Ingrid Tsang and Mr Tang; edited by Mr Murphy



Friday 17 July 2015

Another musical treat

Jean-Sebastien Héry, the multi-talented French musician and composer who visited us for our end-of-year 'Arts Festival' week a little while ago, has played in many different musical styles over the years. One of his most successful ventures came when he suddenly rediscovered his teenage fascination with rock music a few years ago, and got together with a couple of Beijing friends, Dutch bassist Maikel and Chinese drummer Mao Mao, to found AIS (their full name was The Amazing Insurance Salesmen [he went through a phase of calling all of his many musical collaborations The Amazing Something-or-other... a bit of a private joke!!], but as the group became successful, fans soon started to referring to it by the initials only).

As always with Jean-Sebastien, the music drew on a range of different influences: blues, psychedelia, folk, and even a little bit of jazz and classical music, as well as classic rock. It became a signature feature of AIS gigs that they would close their set with an extended free-form improvisation on Caravan, a Central Asian tinged instrumental jazz standard composed by the great Duke Ellington. This, I think, is one of their earlier live renditions of the tune, and is quite restrained by the standards that later evolved: it lasts barely 8 minutes, whereas on occasion, when they were feeling particularly exuberant, they were known to spin it out to 15 or 20 minutes!! (This was filmed at Dos Kolegas [两个好朋友], which unfortunately closed down last year, but had been for several years the greatest of Beijing's cheap, divey music bars - a place run by musicians, for musicians: grungy, chaotic, but always great fun!!!)


The band won the China and Asia rounds of the 2010 Global Battle of the Bands contest, but then lost momentum - as Jean-Sebastien, in his usual restless way, began to move on to other areas of musical interest - and have only played a  rare reunion gig in the last three or four years.

You can listen to the whole of their one-and-only album, Escape, for free on Bandcamp.





We are very privileged that this guy came down to Hangzhou to play just for us.


Wednesday 15 July 2015

Kung Fu demonstration


During one of our 'Project Week' excursions this year, twelve students and three members of staff stayed at a kung fu school run by the Buddhist monks of the Fawang Temple in the Songshan area of Henan province. Here, their shifu demonstrates the basic sequence of practice movements their studies were focused on. 


 A fuller account of the stay at the temple will appear on here shortly.



Wednesday 8 July 2015

Keeping it 'real'

Our culminating practical project in our Film class study of the 'Reality TV' phenomenon this semester was to produce a season trailer for a new show of the students' own devising. We did not have enough time to create 'genuine' shows, so the various scenarios had to be carefully scripted and staged for the camera (this in itself was one of the most important elements in this unit of study, demanding that students pay attention to questions of how much manipulation and fakery goes into many of the actual 'Reality' shows they enjoy, and what the ethical implications of this are).

There were two really outstanding productions. This one, The Sweet Life of Stacey and Tracey, a 'real life soap' concept depicting the tense relationship between a pair of pregnant middle-class teenagers, was filmed and edited by Tiffany Ng; her teammates Yew San Cheah and Vrithik Metha provided logistical support, and produced the voiceover narration and some other additional sound recording. Vital input also came from Emily Duncan and Frances Amos who improvised most of the script in playing the two leads.




And then there was P-Ranked, a competitive prank show that is intended to pit friends against each other in an escalating series of tit-for-tat practical jokes. This was created by Tristan Wong, Fenton Garvie, and Lauren Justice - with a lot of help from various of their dorm mates. This one, I fear, was at times a bit too 'real' for comfort, with some of the pranks being staged without the victim's prior knowledge or consent to capture genuinely surprised - and annoyed - reaction shots.





Other groups' efforts also achieved much of merit, but were compromised by a failure to get to grips with the extreme time pressure we were under: they just didn't get enough footage to present their concept fully and coherently.

Dominic Law, Hugo Chan, and Tippy Pei came up with Hell's Dorm, an 'extreme makeover' style of show focused on the occasional chronic untidiness of our dorms - but unfortunately they didn't get around to shooting the crucial mentor intervention/successful transformation scenes.

Jae Lamb, Ethan Chu and Kevin Ho produced Rap Wars, a talent show format in the style of American Idol, which boasted a few very stylish lighting effects, but omitted to include any actual rapping, or an introduction of the judges. 

And Daniel Carolan, Constance Lam, and Samantha Koo created a piece called A Couple of Wheels, which was intended to be a challenge competition for couples - something in the style of The Amazing Race, but involving goofy physical tests like bubble-wrap wrestling. They underestimated the difficulty of arranging shoots with large numbers of actors and failed to shoot many of the scenes they needed to complete the trailer. Daniel, in the final edit, came up with the ingenious idea of padding out this patchy footage with a lot of explanatory captions, now trying to pass the piece off not as an actual trailer but as a jokey film school re-enactment of a long-forgotten Vietnamese (?!) TV show.




Content advisory:  'Reality TV' has an unfortunate tendency to concentrate on some of the less attractive aspects of human behaviour, and our students embraced this dark side of the genre rather too enthusiastically. There is quite a lot of swearing in all of these films (one key skill students learned was how to 'bleep out' offensive dialogue!).