Film: Documentary Films - All Students Work

It's a pleasure to see students' creativity and hard work in this unit of documentary film making. They have experimented on different documentary styles and they were fully engaged in making their films. There are some excellent films this year! Enjoy watching!!

In no particular order:

Under the stands 不为人知的角落

a film by

Lauren Ho, Charlotte Lai and Gigi Li

Fear 

a film by

Tiffany Chang and Xavier Banson

Solitude 

a film by

Ryan Chiao and Arnold Cheng

My Hangzhou Life 我在杭州的生活

a film by

Angelina Wang and Rahul Melwani

The Foreign Act

a film by

Justing Song, Hadrien Chong and Ming Ko

WAR

a film by

Celine Lee and Hannah Cheung

People Along the Canal  运河人的生活

a film by

Karuna Li, Katrina Mak and Tess Chau

Culture Through Sports

a film by

Ashley Hsu, Alex Okita and Alex Tan

The Power of Google

a film by

Bernard, Ben Tang and Michael

Social Media

a film by

Travis and Max

Solution: Veganism

a film by

Chris and Isaac Um

Life of Teck

a film by

Isaac Yee, Ben Oh and David

Mr. Kinder

a film by

Natasha CW Lee, Ben Lee and Kristie 

Self perception 

a film by

Neil, Tiffany Chan and Lucy

Thanks!

Service and Action Week: HZ Sheraton hotel work experience students interview

Thanks to Hangzhou Sheraton for recording the interviews. 

G20 Schools visiting Hangzhou CIS

Filmed by Pierre, Justin Song and Arnold Cheng!

Service and Action Week - What did we learn from our music trip to Shanghai?

Beyond - the Documentary

Easter dinner in Hangzhou CIS

Beyond Live - A Celebration Of Our Beyond Journey

The start of Beyond Live 

and 

Arnold's documentary

Tracy's Reading

Stephanie and Katherine

The Beyond Challenge film

Michael

Poem Reading

Katherine's Film

Dream

Lauren's Reading

Natasha and Tess's Dance performance

The Untold Retold

Anji and Tonglu

Irene's Reading

Karina's Documentary

Bamboo

Ben Oh's Reading

Ryan's Film

Yan Dang Shan

Josephine's Poem Recordings

Josephine's Dance Performance

Hadrien's Music Performance

with Roger and Ben Tang

Hannah's Film

Horse Riding

Justin Song
安吉丽娜 Tea Shop

Charlotte, Karuna and Lucy's Film

Lost & Found

Go Kart Launch & Tavis' Speech

CIS Hangzhou CNY Gala 2016 汉基杭州春节联欢晚会!

Part 1: Lion Dance -  the best class performances selected by students 

Part 2: The order of performances is from girl's dorm- 202, 301, 401

to boy's dorm - 301, 302;

Part 3: The order of performances is girl's dorm - 302; 

boy's dorm -201; 

girl's dorm 202; 

best dorm decoration competition results;

girls dorm -401, 301; 

boys dorm - 201, 302, 202; 

girl's dorm 201, 401, 402, 201;

all teachers;

Wish everyone a great 2016!

新年快乐!

PE and Music IDU Lion Dance - all classes

Adrian - red head

Harry - red base

Peter - black head

Michael - black base

Celine C - orange head

Karuna - orange base

Tess - red head

Molly - red base

Jemima - purple base

Natasha GM - purple head

Ben T- yellow base

Arif - yellow head

Indya - blue head

Bernie - blue base

Yoon Jin - yellow head

Lucy - yellow base

Michelle Y - purple head

Kat - purple base

Katrina - blue head

Stephanie - blue base

YuSan - red head

Jiazhe - red base

Curtis - black head

Justin - black base

Hadrien - yellow head

Justin - yellow base

Ashley S - red head

Josephine - red base

Charlotte Lai - blue head

Gigi - blue base

Amy - orange head

Queenie - orange base

Kristie - yellow head

Alex T - yellow base

Tina - black head

Donglan - black base

Ben L - red head

David - red base

Candace - orange head

Michelle N - orange base

Natasha L - blue head

Ashley H - blue base

Isaac Y - red head

Ming - red base

Andrea - purple head

Yvette - purple base

Tiffany - orange head

Kimberly - orange base

Irene - blue head

Hannah - blue base

Kevin - yellow head

Calvin - yellow base

Thelma - black head

Charlotte - black base

Alex - purple head

Max - purple base

Roger - black head

Tavis -  black base

Arnold - red head

Xavier - red base

Hal - purple head

Neil - purple base

Haipeng - black head

Nick - black base

Imogen - blue head

Anna - blue base

Rahul - red head

Ryan - red base

Celine L - blue head

Sandra - blue base

Tiffany Chang - purple head

Angelina - purple base

Chris - red head

Isaac U - red base

Ellen - purple head

Lauren - purple base

Tracy - black head 

Pearl - black base

Benjee - red head

Alex - red base

Drama Assessment (Semester 1) - from all drama groups

Tess, Natasha Guang Min Lee, Arif, Michelle Yeung 

Karuna, Lucy, Molly, Adrian

Peter, Bernard, Katrina, Stephanie

Michael, Yoon Jin, Curtis, Indya

Amy, Hadrien, Kristie, Pearl

Ming, Benjamin Oh, Ellen, Yvette

Alex Okita, Ashley Hsu, Josephine Yap, Tracy Lee, Isaac Yee

Natasha Lee, David Peng, Alex Tan, Queenie

Hallock, Charlotte Lang, Neil, Anna

Tavis, Chris, Tiffany Chang, Irene, Alex Zhuo

Kevin, Ryan, Imogen, Isaac Um

Parents Weekend - Taiqi performance

Filmed by Couch Mentor Weifeng Li

School drama performance for parents weekend

Sorry for the missing of music due to copy-right issue. 

Enjoy!

Tongzhou Island 桐洲岛

Filmed by

Angelina Wang

Max Emery

Zhu Laoshi

CIS hangzhou Mid-Autumn celebration

Filmed by Arif Chu

2015-2016 Students orientation week!

Hi, this is CIS Hangzhou TV, stay tuned for this year's amazing events and activities!

First, let's see what happened during the orientation for 2015-2016 students!

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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!).

More musical magic

In the mélée that was our final week of the year, much of the video footage I'd shot of various events around school got mislaid. I had thought this was the greatest of those losses... but happily I have just rediscovered it. Beijing-based French musician Jean-Sebastien Héry joined us for the week as part of our farewell 'Arts Festival'. His main performance for students was on Thursday evening, but the day before he dropped in on our choir rehearsal - a rather fraught final preparation for the performance at the upcoming Parents' Weekend - and entertained students afterwards with this pyrotechnic improvisation on his acoustic guitar. 

Filmed by Mr Murphy

Looking back....

The end of our school year was even more hectic than usual this time around, with two visiting artists in residence during the Arts Festival leading up to the final Parents' Weekend, French musician Jean-Sebastien Héry and German photographic artist Juliana Borinski.

And then there was a feast of music, sport, drama and farewell speeches over the weekend itself. 

I've already posted some highlights from Sunday's Closing Ceremony, and from the contributions of Jean-Sebastien and Juliana - but here is a further montage of some of the best bits of those busy few days. It hardly seems possible that it was little more than a week ago......

Filmed by Mr Murphy

The visits of Jean-Sebastien Héry and Juliana Borinski were generously supported by the school's Annual Fund.

Farewell to another year

Our second year drew to a close last weekend with a formal Closing Ceremony held in the school theatre on Sunday morning. As last year, the principal guest of honour was the General Manager of our Chinese partners, the Greentown Education Company, Mr Chen Hai Ke.

It was a difficult task whittling down nearly 90 minutes of humour, emotion, and music into just 9 minutes - but I've managed it! For those of you with more stamina, the entire ceremony can be viewed here.

Filmed by Mr Murphy

The individual elements of the ceremony can also be viewed as follows:

Choir & Orchestra  -  Vivaldi's Gloria

Speaker  -  Joy Koo (Parent)

Speaker  -  Adam Guo (Student)

Speaker  -  Lorna Scott (Coach Mentor/Teacher)

Speaker  -  Sabrina Chan  (Student)

Speaker  -  Sharon Lam (Teacher)

'Sing Thing' a cappella group  -  The Beatles' In My Life

Speaker  -  Hugo Chan (Student)

Speaker  -  Xu Linjun (Coach Mentor)

Speaker  -  Ingrid Tsang (Student)

Speaker  -  Mitch Grace (Head of Student Life)

Choir  -  Turn The World Around and Fields of Glory

And a complete film of Saturday evening's drama performance History Rewritten; Our Stories Retold can be seen here.