The Benshi

First, the Norwegian students made a stunning set of videos. Then, on their own, they made a “Making Of” video for the projects. Now, they are promoting the workshop’s accomplishments in the Norwegian media, AND they are meeting with administration officials to change their system to do more. Just amazing.

However, here’s a little clip that shows how everything I now say must be taken with a grain of salt. My brain may have been damaged by the death virus I caught that gave me a fever of two million degrees (as Gilda Radnor as Roseanna Roseanna Danna used to say, “I thought I was gonna DAH”). But you can hear the impact of the educational experience in my voice.

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PORTRAIT OF A SLEEP-DEPRIVED, BRAIN DAMAGED FILMMAKER. As I was waiting in the lobby to do the Q&A for the Arctic Frontiers Conference screening of “Sizzle” (which was an excellent screening), a man I’d never met approached with a video camera and shot this — trying to punk me with the same questions we use in the movie. Two days earlier I think I nearly died from the flu virus that was filling their local hospital beds (where I thought of going, but the students warned me, “In Norway all they tell for flu is to gut it out, they won’t give you antibiotics” — they are sooooo smart there). By this point I’d suffered through more than a week of horrendous jet lag; I literally never got more than two consecutive hours of sleep, for a total of about 3 hours per night (never been through anything like it — thought I was at Gitmo). But what’s important is you can hear the astonishment in my voice for what I witnessed the night before when we screened the finished videos.

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And to see the source of my amazement, just look at what they did — here’s the 5 student videos. Most importantly, at the end is a “Making Of” video which THEY themselves put together all on their own after I left (not only did I not ask them, I kept warning them to not let it get in their way of making the class videos), IN THEIR FRICKIN’ SPARE TIME while doing these excellent 5 videos.

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IN THEIR WORDS. I swear to you, there was only one student, of the 25, who had any previous video production experience whatsoever.  Not only did they smoothly (zero conflict, zero anxiety, zero drama) produce their individual videos, they also, almost instinctively, shot a “Making Of” video about it all, on the side, which is the last video in their line up.