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Whitman College

Chinese

Videos to accompany the Taiwan Today textbook

Date Awarded: April, 2000

Other Participants:
Faculty: Lotus Sun Perry (in the script writing)
Technical support personnel: David Sprunger
Student assistants: two students hired in Taiwan

Project Goals and Objectives:

To shoot video films in Taiwan to supplement two chapters in the Taiwan Today textbook. One chapter is "In the Park" and the other is "Drinking Tea". The objective is to computerize the films in small strips (short scenes) so that the students can click on each scene then watch and listen to it.

Process:

I used an 8mm digital Sonny camcorder to shoot the films. When I went to Taipei I went to a Chinese Language Center to look for a suitable actress to take the role of an American student learning Chinese in
Taiwan. I asked a friend's son who had just graduated from college to take the role of the local host. I held a meeting with the two students, explained the project, and went over the scripts with them.

Then we went out to look for the sites for the shooting. We needed a park where people do different activities, a tea house, a store that sells tea leaves, and a living quarter for students. We had several rehearsals at each site and then shot the scenes several times. The shooting took us four days. The total working days in Taiwan were eight days.I did the editing job back at Whitman. First a student at the media center taught me how to operate the machines. He also showed me how to edit the films. I learned to cut, paste, and divide the films into short scenes. This took five days. Then David Sprunger copied the films onto CD's and posted them on the website.

Outcomes:

I used both the video and the CD for my students in Third Year Chinese (offered as Independent Study). They liked the scenes because they now had visual, actual site scenes to help them understand the text and
they could listen to conversations which the text of narratives did not provide.

Critical Evaluations:

The scripts were workable, the sites were good selections, the actors were excellent, but the shooting was not professional enough. I learned to use a digital camera and to edit the films. Learning to edit was the
most exciting part for me. I would like to do more of this kind of work to prepare for my language courses.