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.