On Friday 24th February 2023, the Thai Department invited Mr Adisorn Trisirikasem (Khun Ping) to meet with our Year 10 to Year 13 students. Khun Ping is one of Thailand's leading directors as well as a writer and an actor, he graduated with a Bachelor of Communication Arts degree specialising in Film and Photography from Chulalongkorn University.
One of the most well known Thai movie he had directed was "Fan Chun (แฟนฉัน)" in 2003, this movie was the most popular and the highest grossing movie of the year in Thailand. He won "The Asian New Talent Award" (2004) and "The Thailand National Film Association Award" (2004) for Best Director. In 2022, he wrote the screenplay for the movie "Love Destiny 2 (บุพเพสันนิวาส 2)" which was originally a famous novel and also a hit Thai drama series called "Love Destiny (บุพเพสันนิวาส)".
Khun Ping met with the students to share what inspires him and shared his experiences as a director. It was a great opportunity for our students to learn more about his passion, attitude, work style and fascinating experiences as a director. In addition, our students welcomed our guest with the following performances:
• drama performance titled ‘STA Love Destiny 2023’ by Oat [Year 12], Pinky [Year 13]
• dance performance by Jom [Year 7], Mimi [Year 8], Narni [Year 8] and Minon [Year 8]
• 'If You Love Someone (ถ้าเธอรักใครคนหนึ่ง)' song performed by Pinky [Year 13]
• East-Meets-West music performance by Pond [Year 10] - Ra-nard, Jada [Year 10] - Khim, Finn [Year 13] - drums, Chay [Year 13] - guitar, Mei [Year 13] - bass, and Bless [Year 13] - piano.
All the performances were so lovely and truly captured our students’ creativity and fantastic team work in transforming Khun Ping’s “Love Destiny 2'' film into their own STA style production. They all brilliantly used ‘intertext’ knowledge and skills they have learned from their Thai lessons.
After the show, Jada [Year 10] and Pond [Year 10] represented their classmates and interviewed Khun Ping. This interview inspired our students to reflect on the valuable lessons shared by Khun Ping. Not only is he a successful director but he is a true professional who believes “to never look down on your audience” and “every part, every element in every piece of his work is always important and meaningful to him". He spent two years making the movie (Love Destiny 2) and said "it took two years of my life so I knew I should make it worthwhile during that time”. Khun Ping also mentioned “I hope my work would motivate someone to create something new and beneficial, to extend into something else'', all the lessons that he shared with the students were really inspirational and helpful.
Lastly, there was a workshop where students worked in mixed groups of Year 10s to Year 13s, providing students a chance to work with students of different ages and ideas. Khun Ping gave them an ‘Intertext’ task to create a new piece of work by making the main characters of the series “Love Destiny” or the film “Love Destiny 2” reincarnated into people in another time/period/place/context. Students were encouraged to create their pieces freely and all worked very hard to come up with a variety of fun stories. Each group then presented their pieces and received feedback from Khun Ping. This was a great exercise in creative skills for our students and really enriched their thinking, they continued working on their pieces with the added feedback from Khun Ping and will present their final stories to him later in March.
Thank you to Khroo Toey for organising this event, Khroo Boongkie for organising the lovely opening show, Orm [Year 12] for creating the event poster, and thank you to the Drama Department, ICT Department, Estates Department for supporting this event. This will be another fond memory for our whole team and the students at St Andrews.
High School Thai Department
