Hangzhou Weekly News - Interview with Mr Pratt

CIS Hangzhou Director, Richard Pratt, reflects on the beginning of our second year.

Closing Ceremony - June 2014

We rounded off our momentous first year here in Hangzhou with a formal closing ceremony at the end of our final parents' weekend on Sunday 15th June.
Kenny Jeong and Catherine Wang were our very capable MCs. Dan Kinzer and Jianping Pratt spoke on behalf of CIS Hangzhou teaching staff, Andi Lee, Charlie Salnikow, Madeleine Witt, and John Yap on behalf of the students, Natalie Lau and Yohei Tse on behalf of the Coach Mentors, and Guy Chambers on behalf of the parents.
Distinguished guests were Xu Yichao, Deputy General Secretary of the Hangzhou Communist Party, Xiao Feng of the Hangzhou Education Bureau, Chen Feng and Zheng Ping of the Hangzhou Entry & Exit Administration, Jin Heng of the Hangzhou Foreign Affairs Office, Chen Haike, Yu Zhengping, and Wang Yinchu of the Greentown Education Group, Chen Jianguo, Principal of Greentown Yuhua High School, Sun Zhuoren, Deputy Principal of Greentown Yuhua Middle School, and Chen Xiaojen, Deputy Principal of Greentown Yuhua Primary School.
The event closed with a musical performance by our whole-school choir.

[My apologies for the poor sound: the shotgun microphone I was trying to use had a faulty jack-plug, and the onboard microphone in the camera wasn't really adequate at this distance.]

Hangzhou Weekly News - arrival

A few first impressions - our high-spirited new crop of students' arrival in CIS Hangzhou last week.

Filmed by Adam Guo and Ingrid Tsang; edited by Stephen Chan

China Grassroots Football

One of the most popular and successful of our 'Community & Service' projects has been our involvement with China Grassroots Football (CGF), an NGO that provides football coaching to young Chinese children. During Project Week last March, several students helped run a coaching camp (where they were themselves able to train for a Chinese FA coaching certificate). To promote that event, Joe Littler - outstanding Film student and enthusiastic CGF participant - prepared this montage of the experiences of his classmates during the twice-weekly sessions coaching for CGF that they had been taking part in throughout the year. 

Where we came from...

CIS Hangzhou Director Richard Pratt created this montage of his favourite photographs from 2012 to 2014, celebrating the process of building and establishing our school. This was first shared at the farewell assembly for our opening year's students, before they returned to Hong Kong this June.

The music is If I Were A Bell, performed by Miles Davis. 

Photographed and edited by Mr Pratt

They loved it!

Towards the end of our first year of operation, we asked our students to sum up what they'd most enjoyed about their time here in Hangzhou. 

This year's new batch of students will surely soon be building up their own store of happy memories of the place.

Filmed and edited by Coach Mentor Aydee Tie

End-of-year concert

Last night, as part of our Arts Festival to welcome parents for our farewell weekend, a group of music students performed a classical concert in the Music Hall.

Here are some of the highlights:

Sophia Chan playing Henryk Wieniawski's Scherzo for Violin...

Kelly Kwok playing Frédéric Chopin's Scherzo in B Minor on piano...

And Yudo Wong playing J.S. Bach's 2nd Flute Sonata...

Sophia and Yudo are, of course, accompanied on the piano by our Director of Music, Tama Karena.

Meeting Cindy Pon

CIS Hangzhou's first ever writer-in-residence, American Chinese YA author Cindy Pon, spent the first week of June on campus with us. Although she had arrived over the weekend and had already attended some classes on Monday morning, her formal introduction to the student body came when everyone assembled in the Library meeting area on Monday afternoon to hear her being interviewed about her life and work by English teacher Paul Murphy, who had arranged her visit.

Filmed by Hayson Chu

Thanks to the CIS Annual Fund for its generous support of this initiative

Three views of our first year in Hangzhou

Back in November, Film students Yudo Wong, Abigail Yee, and Ciara Jacob were practising shooting interviews as part of their study unit on the documentary genre.

Here we have some reflections on the early months of CIS Hangzhou from Abi herself, from English and Film teacher Paul Murphy [Gosh, I was porky at the start of the year! They say the camera adds a few kilos - but the rest is all my own fault!], and from Coach Mentor Liu Jing.

Hengdian

Semester 2 Film students took a class trip in March to visit the Hengdian World Studios, a major Zhejiang tourist attraction in the town of Dongyang, about 120 miles south of Hangzhou. Hengdian is a vast site, boasting several of the world's largest outdoor movie sets, including a full-size replica of the Forbidden City and a Han Dynasty palace that was built in the mid-90s for the filming of Chen Kaige's The Emperor and The Assassin and was made even more famous when it featured in Zhang Yimou's Hero in 2002.

Filmed and edited by Nick Berry, Cheryl Lee and Jeffrey Lam

A Coach Mentor speaks

One of our Coach Mentors, Wang Lu, was interviewed in Chinese by Nick Hildebrandt, Madeleine Witt, and Noam Braude for one of their Semester 1 assessment projects in Film. He has some interesting things to say about how this new role is evolving. [Subtitles in English]

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

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

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

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).

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.]

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