Former teacher Huang Ming-pao (黃明寶) has made more than 300 drone videos of Tainan schools for school officials to use for promotional or educational programs.
The videos, made over a two-and-a-half year period, are available on his eponymous Youtube channel, the 52-year-old said.
“Students can learn about their schools and the community around them, while graduates who left their homes to work or live elsewhere can also revisit their alma maters through the films,” he said.
Photo: Liu Wan-chun, Taipei Times
A few schools have sent him thank-you notes, saying they had wanted to make such videos themselves, Huang said.
When he worked as an administrator, he frequently attended meetings with teachers from other schools and would wonder what their schools were like, he said.
Six months before his retirement, he impulsively bought a NT$1,000 discount drone from a catalog and started making aerial films, Huang said.
His first drone was bulky and crashed due to turbulence after just a few uses, but he was inspired to replace it with a NT$20,000 custom-made unit, Huang said.
Footage from the second drone was shaky and he continued to have trouble controlling it, and also lost it in a crash, he said.
With his third drone, he began learning how to control it through practice and by watching videos made by others, Huang said, adding that the quality of his footage eventually improved.
The sight of a campus from the ground is familiar to students and teachers, but an aerial view offers an entirely new perspective, he said.
Like the cityscape around them, local schools are changing rapidly and the videos would one day become a historical record of not only the schools’ layouts, but the communities around them, he said.
However, his activities have also gotten him into trouble.
On one occasion, a school he was filming was near a military base and he was detained by a squad of soldiers on suspicion of espionage, Huang said.
He was allowed to leave after the soldiers were satisfied with his explanation and he had deleted the files, he added.
He is trying to make videos of every school in the city before the law changes, as the government has been tightening laws regulating drone use, Huang said.
A tropical depression east of the Philippines became a tropical storm early yesterday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, less than a week after a typhoon barreled across the nation. The agency issued an advisory at 3:30am stating that the 22nd tropical storm, named Yinxing, of the Pacific typhoon season formed at 2am. As of 8am, the storm was 1,730km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan’s southernmost point, with a 100km radius. It was moving west-northwest at 32kph, with maximum sustained winds of 83kph and gusts of up to 108kph. Based on its current path, the storm is not expected to hit Taiwan, CWA
Residents have called on the Taipei City Government to reconsider its plan to demolish a four-decades-old pedestrian overpass near Daan Forest Park. The 42-year-old concrete and steel structure that serves as an elevated walkway over the intersection of Heping and Xinsheng roads is to be closed on Tuesday in preparation for demolition slated for completion by the end of the month. However, in recent days some local residents have been protesting the planned destruction of the intersection overpass that is rendered more poetically as “sky bridge” in Chinese. “This bridge carries the community’s collective memory,” said a man surnamed Chuang
A tropical depression east of the Philippines became a tropical storm earlier today, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The 22nd tropical storm, named Yinxing, in this year's Pacific typhoon season formed at 2am, the CWA said. As of 8am, the storm was 1,730km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻) with a 100km radius, it said. It was moving west-northwest at 32kph, with maximum sustained winds of 83kph and gusts of up to 108kph. Based on its current path, the storm is not expected to hit Taiwan, CWA meteorologist Huang En-hung (黃恩宏) said. However, a more accurate forecast would be made on Wednesday, when Yinxing is
MILITARY AID: Taiwan has received a first batch of US long-range tactical missiles ahead of schedule, with a second shipment expected to be delivered by 2026 The US’ early delivery of long-range tactical ballistic missiles to Taiwan last month carries political and strategic significance, a military source said yesterday. According to the Ministry of National Defense’s budget report, the batch of military hardware from the US, including 11 sets of M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) and 64 MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile Systems, had been scheduled to be delivered to Taiwan between the end of this year and the beginning of next year. However, the first batch arrived last month, earlier than scheduled, with the second batch —18 sets of HIMARS, 20 MGM-140 missiles and 864 M30