This was one of the best of last year's Film class efforts on their unit of study on Reality TV. They were asked to produce a series trailer illustrating a new Reality TV concept of their own devising. This scenario was a makeover challenge for an overweight youngster. This year's Film students have just embarked on the same task, so I shared this with them as an inspiration.
A film by Joe Littler, Kameka Herbst, Hayson Chu, and Amy Hopkins
Hayson was the narrator/personal trainer, Joe the compulsive eater, and Vanessa Wat was his would-be love interest.
Well, it hasn't for the last few weeks! We've had a grim run of weather in Hangzhou lately, but this week the sun has reappeared and it has started to feel as though Spring may be just around the corner at last. This made for a particularly jolly outing for the China Grassroots Football crew yesterday, and Mr Pratt couldn't resist making another slideshow.
There were many great moments in our Chunjie skit show just before the last vacation, but many people's favourite was this little 'Harry Potter' clip in which Coach Mentor He Guannan and his boys from dormitory S.202 compared certain of our staff to characters from the famous Hogwarts school. [I am flattered to be 'played' by the great Alan Rickman, though I really don't see the Snape connection!!!]
Last Friday, CIS Hong Kong, our parent school, held its annual dinner for its support staff. Our IT Manager, Edwin Chan, represented CIS Hangzhou at this event, and gave a talk about our progress over our first 18 months of operation (is it only that long??).
He put together this slideshow of his own and other staff members' photographs to illustrate his remarks.
The finale to our Farewell Concert just before Chinese New Year was a routine by our ever-popular African Drumming troupe: Jerry Yang, Sabrina Chan, Victoria Ngai, Becca Guo, Constance Lam, Adam Guo, Wang Lu, and Pierre Biret.
Most of our lion dancers only did their routines for the rest of the school, but three of the best pairs - as voted for by their classmates - got to perform at a city centre shopping mall, alongside our charity craft fair, which was the centrepiece of our Chinese 'IDE' celebrating the coming Lunar New Year.
This is Andy Ji practising the erhu piece 良宵 (Liang Xiao - Beautiful Night) by Liu Tianhua, in preparation for a public performance in the outdoor plaza of the Euro American Center mall the next day, alongside our pop-up craft market there - the centrepiece of our Chinese 'IDE' to celebrate the approaching Chinese New Year.
And here's the actual performance at the plaza on Friday 6th February. (There is, unfortunately, quite a lot of background noise, but the sound recording has come out fairly well on this.)
Enrique Chuidian, Kate Bradley, Karis Tao, Isabella Boyne, and Jasmine and Georgina Savage rehearse an a cappella arrangement of the popular Chinese song Da Hai A Gu Xiang (大海啊 故乡, composed by Wang Liping), in preparation for a performance at our Chinese New Year's Craft Fair event at the Euro American Center shopping mall the next day.
And you can hear them performing it at the EAC here (although it's not a great recording, as it was in the open air and there was a lot of background noise).
Here is the final element of our Chinese 'IDE' at the end of our last session of school: a Saturday morning concert of music performances and comical skits, mostly prepared and performed in dormitory groups - part of our efforts to celebrate the imminent Chinese New Year. The MCs were Frances Amos and Tippy Pei.
This is just a selection of the highlights. You can watch the entire concerthere. [Two other films about the earlier phases of this IDE activity can be seen here and here.]
The second phase of our Chinese 'IDE' celebrating the Lunar New Year: students spent 4 hours in the plaza of the Euro American Center shopping mall - entertaining passers-by with impromptu performances and selling handmade craft products to raise money for charity.
[The 'flash mob' episode accompanied a rendition of the Zambian hymn Bonse Aba, but I wasn't able to get a decent recording of that live, so I have used a version sung by the Lenoir Rhyne Youth Chorus.]
The Part 1 film, on preparations the day before, can be seen here.
A few highlights from our preparations for the Chinese New Year this year. We gave over the last few days of our Jan/Feb session to an 'Inter-Disciplinary Experience' (IDE) led by the Chinese Department: students prepared performances for a farewell concert, and created homemade crafts to be sold in aid of local charities at a pop-up market in a local mall the next day.
There was also a keenly contested inter-dormitory competition for the best decorations and hospitality displayed to a visiting judging panel (Mr Karena, Mr Tam, Ms Lam and Ms Lee) on Thursday evening.
On Sunday 1st February, just before our Chunjie break, we transformed our black-box theatre into a cabaret/café for the evening to host a 'Live Lounge' concert.
Masterminded by Katie Eu and Mrs Grace on behalf of the student Arts & Social Committee, the event had so many people coming forward to participate that it ran on on well past its planned 70-80 minutes.... and exhausted the batteries in both of the video cameras I was using to try to record the event. I replaced them as quickly as I could, but one performance - Enrique Chuidian and Camille Chiang singing a Jack Johnson song - unfortunately did not get filmed. My apologies.
The concert was so long that - for the purposes of editing and uploading the footage - I was obliged to divide it into two parts. The final 45 minutes or so (the overrun!!) can be seen below.
The films above were shot from various points around the room with a handheld camera. You can also see an alternate view of the show (again in two parts), shot from a static camera on a tripod at the side of the stage, here and here. The pictures from this second camera mostly turned out quite well, but the sound quality was rather poorer than on the handheld shots.
I have also posted all the individual performances separately: they can be accessed via this list of links (which also appears at the top of the sidebar on the right here).
Many thanks to everyone who took part, to our splendid MCs Jasmine Savage and Enrique Chuidian, to the hard-working stage crew of Jean Yap, Yew San Cheah and Tristan Wong - and to Katie Eu and Mrs Grace for their considerable organisational efforts over the past several weeks.
Live Lounge - films of all the performances from our cabaret-concert a week ago should be ready by the middle of this week. I'll post a few highlights on here, and put a full link list up in the 'pages' section at the top of the sidebar.
And......
Chinese New Year celebrations- I should have a highlights reel (or two) of our CNY activities up on here next week, shortly before the New Year finally arrives. Watch this space.
One of our most eager film-makers this year, Stephen Chan, isn't actually studying Film with me, alas. He shot this little film, 'Back', a montage of the journey back from Hangzhou to Hong Kong, on his camera-phone - on this year group's first trip back, for the half-term break in October. It's a journey most of our students will make at least five times during their year here. They're just about to do it again....
A film by Stephen Chan
The music, he tells me, is Channel 42 by deadmau5 and Wolfgang Gartner.
At the end of Semester 1 last year I arranged for both of my Film classes to visit the Hangzhou No. 2 Old People's Home to conduct interviews with some of the residents - a kind of precursor to our recent 'Humans of Hangzhou' project.
Unfortunately, we were assailed by legions of gremlins on and after these shoots (everything from broken tripod mounts to faulty SD cards and hard drive meltdowns; it was a veritable Biblical plague of technical 'issues'!), and most of the footage we got was lost or proved to be unusable. We eventually managed to salvage this one reel of some of the old folk's closing remarks - their New Year hopes and wishes for the upcoming Year of the Horse (now very nearly past).
As part of our efforts to connect with Chinese culture, PE classes at the end of Semester 1 spend a month or so studying the art of lion dancing - a traditional centrepiece of Chinese New Year celebrations - and work in small teams to produce a performance. Here is a highlight reel of the final performances for assessment in class last Friday morning. The best pairs, as chosen by their classmates, will perform again during our New Year festivities this week.
The traditional percussion accompanying the performances was composed and recorded by Mr Karena's music students.
Links to full films of all the separate student team performances (in two views, one shot from a tripod and the other handheld) can be found here. [And links to some of last year's performances can be found here]
We're just about to hold our second annual 'talent show' here at CIS Hangzhou this Sunday evening - this year styled Live Lounge.
By happy coincidence, I just unearthed this reminder of last year's show. Some of my Film students, just embarking on their Semester 2 unit of study on 'Reality TV', decided to make this portrait of two of our performers, Kelly Kwok and Vanessa Wat, preparing for the big night. Although this was a non-assessed preliminary exercise, it ended up being one of the most charming and polished films we produced all year. I had thought I'd lost it - but it was merely misfiled.
Vanessa and Kelly sing the classic Fly Me To The Moon (words and music by Bart Howard - which can also be heard in this impromptu performance in a Shanghai park during last year's Project Week) and do a dance routine to Justin Bieber's Beauty and a Beat.
A film by Joe Littler, Kameka Herbst, Hayson Chu and Amy Hopkins
A midget theatre troupe specialising in 皮影戏 - piyingxi, Chinese shadow play - visited the school on the afternoon of Monday 26th January to demonstrate some of the techniques of this art. Here is a montage of the activities our students enjoyed with them.
The troupe's two extended shadow play performances can be seen here and here, and three additional short scenes here.
The organisers of the CISSMUN VI Model United Nations conference we attended two weeks ago have kindly shared with us this video portrait of the event which was first screened during the conference closing ceremony on Sunday the 18th of January. Our own Sabrina Chan - one of the reporters helping to compile the conference's daily magazine, The Vigil - appears quite prominently among the vox pop interviews. Eleven CIS Hangzhou students participated in the conference this year.
Once again, many thanks and congratulations are owed to Mr Erik Paulson, the supervising MUN teacher at Concordia International School Shanghai (CISS), Steven Pan the conference's Secretary-General, and all of the organising team for staging a simply superb event.
Our new Drama teacher, Jen Grace, and a few of her students led a series of workshops with students from Greentown Yuhua Middle School during the early part of this semester - preparing to present a special Christmas show, an original adaptation of Disney's Frozen.
This short documentary about the project was made by a film team of GYS students.
Our Coach Mentor team have just devised a particularly engaging Inter-Disciplinary Experience (IDE) to develop some of the key 'Approaches to Learning' that are an integral part of the curriculum in the IB Middle Years Program. Inspired by Brandon Stanton's cult photo blog Humans of New York, we set out to create a 'Humans of Hangzhou' project - where our students would go out and talk with people on the streets of the city, take photographs of them and record the highlights of their conversations. The results of their endeavours over two days were displayed in an art exhibition in our theatre and on our newly launched Humans of Hangzhou website.
A small group of CIS HZ students travels every Wednesday to a primary school in a rundown suburb of Hangzhou where - in collaboration with the NGO China Grassroots Football - they lead a variety of football coaching games with local schoolchildren.
One of my Film students last year, Charlotte Suan, created this montage of the trip for her final assessment project (with just a little help from her teammates Ryan Hsu and Nick Hildebrandt).
We have featured CGF on this blog before, here and here.
CISSMUN VI, the sixth annual Model United Nations conference to be hosted by Concordia International School Shanghai, was held from the 16th to 18th of January. The whole of our very vigorous and enthusiastic MUN Club - energetically marshalled by Emily Duncan - took part. Emily, Flora Xiao, Lauren Mok, and Jacky Tam represented Thailand on four of the six General Assembly committees, while Natalie Chak, Katherine Ye, Tippy Pei, and Adam Guo represented Yemen on the same committees; Enrique Chuidian was a Yemeni 'expert' on the special Advisory Panel; and Sabrina Chan and Dominic Law were invited to join the press team on the conference's own magazine, the Vigil.
CIS Hong Kong also sent a delegation of nine members, seven of whom had been with us in CIS Hangzhou last year: Kenny Jeong, John Yap, Axel Leven, Victor Yin, Hannah Hui, Gloria Schiavo, and Jemima Barr. This was the first time members of the current and previous Hangzhou cohorts had had occasion to meet on official business - a moment of such historic import that Ms Lam and Ms Lee travelled nearly 100 miles on public transport to join us all for dinner on Saturday evening!!!
The students and staff at Concordia deserve unstinting applause for a superbly organised event - much the best of its kind that I have ever been to. I very much hope that both CIS Hangzhou and CIS Hong Kong will make this a fixture in their MUN calendars from now on.
Slideshow created by Mr Murphy
The music is - of course! - Everybody Wants To Rule The World by Tears For Fears.[Sorry - I couldn't help myself!]
Round about this time last year we staged a Talent Show. Not the most polished act, but one of the most memorable (a huge amount of film was shot of the event by various staff and students, but it all seems to have got lost!) was punk duo Forced Breakfast, with their almost eponymous first compositionBreakfast! - a raucous protest against compulsory breakfast attendance. [This year's crop of students seem to be much more accepting of this imposition...]
Breakfast! is written and performed by Fin McCombe (guitar, vocals) and Axel Leven (drums).
My thanks to Forced Breakfast's 'manager' Becca Guo for passing on this rare video footage of one of their few public performances.
In the bleak midwinter, our idyllic three-day retreat on nearby Tongzhou island back in the middle of October seems a very long way away indeed - but it's warming to look back and remind ourselves one more time. Here, to complete a trilogy of films on the three main learning activities different groups of students undertook while on the trip, is Film student Shanyu Hou's mini-documentary on the 'Culinary Capers' cooking project. [Here are links to the other two, the 'Orchestrash' music project and the 'Coastlines' PR project.]
