Episode 53: Zooming In on Documentaries with Jamie Benning
How to reach Jamie and see his work:
Transcript:
Melissa Milner 0:09
Hi, this is Melissa Milner. Welcome to The Teacher As... podcast. The goal of this weekly podcast is to help you explore your passions and learn from others in education and beyond to better your teaching. The Teacher As... podcast will highlight innovative practices and uncommon parallels in education.
Jamie Benning 0:28
Yeah, my name is Jamie Benning. I am a London based live television editor, but as a kind of side hustle, I have this project called Filmumentaries which I started back in, I think 2006, making behind the scenes content on some of my favorite movies. And most recently, I've created the Filmumentaries Podcast, which I'm enjoying doing immensely.
Melissa Milner 0:53
Yes, I've seen that you've done Jaws and Star Wars and so on, but how can people see those?
Jamie Benning 1:01
Yeah, so if you go to vimeo.com and look for either Jamie Benning, or if you search for filmumentary, it's like documentary but with film at the top. And you'll find my stuff there. So yeah, I've got feature links, behind the scenes filmumentaries, as I call them on Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jaws and also have a bunch of shorter videos about some of those same movies about some different movies as well and interviews with people that worked in the industry or still work in the industry. I did a few of those on video, but then we COVID struck I couldn't do those anymore. So that's when I turned to the audio only format of a podcast. And I am I'm 30 something episodes in now.
Melissa Milner 1:52
Very good. So people who listen to The Teacher as... regularly know that my favorite movie of all time is Jaws. So I definitely want to check out at least that one so Vimeo that makes sense.
Jamie Benning 2:05
Yeah.
Melissa Milner 2:05
All right. So, have you always been sort of a storyteller slash, you know, fascinated with movies, and I guess again, because editing is storytelling. It's all storytelling, right?
Jamie Benning 2:19
Yeah. I mean, I kind of fell in love with movies as a kid, and like so many people of my generation I'm, I'm 45 just turned 45 this year, we kind of fell in love with the original Star Wars movies. So I, you know, was born into a world where Star Wars already existed, pretty much as soon as I was conscious. I was born in 76. Star Wars came out in 77 and it was everywhere. And it was everywhere in my bedroom. It was my curtains. It was my duvet, it was my toys, it was my books, it was my audio tapes and records. And yeah, just fell in love with those stories. And, and I think like any kid, you know, we're kind of programmed to tell stories. We play in what we call the playground here in the UK in our lunch break, and we would invent stories, and they would be around those films that we'd seen, or films that we shouldn't have seen. Because we were too young, like, like Alien and Terminator, and things like that a bit later on. But, you know, we're always telling stories, and we're always pretending to be those characters and, and kind of bounced off what we know about those characters and creating new stories from those. So kind of been surrounded by stories all my life and, and my grandfather also was a good storyteller, a good joke teller, as is my uncle, his son. And when my granddad passed away, I kind of suddenly realized that all those stories were kind of...had disappeared in a way. I remembered some of the details, but not all, and I couldn't tell him in the way that he told them. And I suddenly felt there was this kind of imperative to speak to people in the film industry, the industry that I'm fascinated with, not only from the actual films themselves, but the stories behind the cameras. I wanted to speak to those people that, you know, might not have had an opportunity to tell those stories, I'll tell their stories. So I immediately got in contact with some gentlemen and some women who were in their 70s and 80s. And just kind of began this I guess it's a kind of a growing archive in a way.
Melissa Milner 4:17
Very, very cool. It's like investigative journalism pretty much right?
Jamie Benning 4:22
It is.
Melissa Milner 4:23
You don't really know what you're going to get from the interviews you're just going in and asking questions right?
Jamie Benning 4:28
Well, that's it and you know, quite a few of the people I've spoken to haven't really done that many interviews. Or if they have they've been in you know, a snippet of a documentary, where they just got a couple of lines, like there was a guy who I've become friends with Ivor Powell, who was the executive producer on Alien and Blade Runner, and he's actually got a new film coming out. Later this year on Apple. Apple have just bought it was called Bios. It's now called Finch starring Tom Hanks. It's like a dystopian sci fi thing and it's it looks really good. But I, you know, I've seen him in documentaries, but you just get a snippet here and a snippet there. But sitting down with somebody for one or two hours or in the case of Ivor spending most of the day with him, we, you know, had a good chance to kind of dig into what drove him to get into the industry. You know, how he continued on in the industry and how, in his 70s he's still, you know, chipping away and making things and that's the sort of stuff that fascinates me. I don't necessarily like those documentaries that kind of dart around between different subjects in different... different stories, I kind of like the singular story, you know, the face to face conversations. So that's why it lends itself so well to the podcast format. I wish I'd thought of it earlier.
Melissa Milner 5:47
Yes, did so when you were young? I mean, did you go to school for film? What was your trajectory into doing what you're doing now?
Jamie Benning 5:57
I think like a lot of people, you know, I, in my sort of upbringing, my my, I was sort of lower middle class, I guess, working class ish. You know, my father worked in a manual job, my mother worked in administration job. And I was, luckily, I was in a position where we were kind of okay financially and comfortable enough that I could sort of dream a little bit, I guess, but I came straight out of school, didn't go to college immediately. And I went to work for the police. I worked at Scotland Yard for a year.
Melissa Milner 6:30
Oh, wow.
Jamie Benning 6:31
And that really was a real education. To me, because it was the first time I surrounded by people from different age groups, different ethnic backgrounds, and again, the whole sort of storytelling aspect of working with these people and sitting with different people every day over this 10 or 12 month period. And then I worked in the government post for about five years. While I was doing that I put myself through university, I found it while I was doing a full time job, I did a part time degree at university, which was media production. And technology, it took three or four years instead of three, as I say, I funded it myself with with my work and you know, I came out the other side of that, with a qualification that kind of meant that I could enter into the TV or film industry and my my kind of hope was that I would get into the film industry. What actually happened is I ended up getting into the TV industry and into live sport. Now I'm not particularly a big sports fan. But it has quite what it's done is it's a you know, I worked as a staff member for a while and outside broadcast company. And then I was made redundant when they lost a big contract. And I came back as a freelancer, and kind of haven't looked back. But what that enables me to do, even though it's a stressful job, it's live TV, you know, I'm working on Formula One motor racing along the time, that's been my kind of bread and butter work. So we traveled the world pre COVID, 20 years of traveling the world have, you have this kind of bubble of stress, while you're on air, you know, sometimes we're in positions for 10 or 12 hours. But what it means is on the other side of that, I don't have my work with me, you know, it's live TV, you you're there, you prep, you go on and it's and it's done, you don't take your work home with you. And what that enabled me to do, therefore was to kind of look into other things that I might want to do for myself. And you know, I've had a few situations where I've been kind of courted by studios. First it was Warner Brothers. Then it was Fox got very close to doing a Planet of the Apes documentary for Fox. And then I did a bit of consultancy work for Disney. But what I have found working with these big companies is that you, you hit so many brick walls. With regards as to what you would like to do, suddenly, you're doing something entirely different.
Melissa Milner 8:51
Yeah.
Jamie Benning 8:52
And it doesn't quite fit with what your intention was. So in a way, it kind of showed me that I could do something on my own. And that's the great thing about doing these videos and doing these podcasts because with the videos, I've never made any money on them because I use copyrighted material. But because I'm using it in an educational way, there's a bit of a gray area about Fair Use.
Melissa Milner 9:13
Right.
Jamie Benning 9:13
Whereas with the podcast now I have a Patreon account so patrons can sign up and they can support me if they want, they don't necessarily get anything out of it other than the pleasure of supporting somebody they enjoy listening to. I throw a few free posters at people in a couple of exclusive little bits of content but you know we're now in an environment where you can create your own content and I do it in my spare time.
Melissa Milner 9:41
And then your creative freedom is still there. Exactly.
Jamie Benning 9:44
That's it Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's it's quite a lot of work is a lot of research you do you like you said you are in investigative journalist, you know, you're you're becoming an expert on that person on those topics that you're going to talk about and I find that really interesting because it's the kind of thing I would be doing anyway, you know, my wife always says to me, "Well, you know, the money you're spending on blu rays and magazines, and research is kind of the money you'd be spending anyways." So...
Melissa Milner 10:13
Absolutely,
Jamie Benning 10:14
I you know, I'm kind of, I think I'm just about making a little bit of profit now, which is good, but that's never what it was about. For me.
Melissa Milner 10:21
It sounds like a passion for you. And it's really, it's something you love.
Jamie Benning 10:26
Yeah, it doesn't feel like I mean, it is work. It's hard work, but it doesn't feel like work because I enjoy it. And I enjoy my job as well. I work with a great group, and a great team of people that we've put together over the years. And you know, I've had some some great support from people that I work with, I was actually seeing a friend off yesterday, he's off to Montreal to live, him and his girlfriend, and we had a bit of a kind of leaving party, on a terrace bar in outside in London last night, all COVID safe and everything. actually. And so many people who hadn't seen for this last year and a half, well, we've not been not all of us have been traveling with Formula One, because my work is now done remotely. We're coming up to me and you know, very encouraging, saying very encouraging words about the podcast and how much they're enjoying it. And, you know, you realize that people that are enjoying this on the other end of me just sitting in in my little office here at home and doing these Zoom calls and phone calls to people I admire. And I think that's the thing for me, I kind of realized, if I create something that I like, there's bound to be other people that are going to like it in the same way.
Melissa Milner 11:33
Absolutely. I did a series on podcasting with students. And I'm just getting started, I have my own podcast for over a year. But I'm, you know, with the team that I work with, where podcasting with the students, and I really think it's the key is giving them voice and choice and having it be something they're really interested in. And as far as interviewing, you know, Dave, I interviewed Dave Malkoff from the weather Weather Channel. And, and he said, you know, don't have questions when you go into into an interview, like don't have them written down. And, you know, and that sounded like really hard. Like, I have fourth graders, I'm like, Can I really send a fourth grader out to do an interview without the questions written down? And then it really came to me as as I was talking to him, and you just said it again. If they're interested in the person they're talking to, and they're curious, they're going to listen, and they're going to have natural follow up questions and when you go into an interview, I mean, do you have like a clear plan? Or do you really go in with an open mind and like, see what happens? How do you approach an interview?
Jamie Benning 12:44
For me it's kind of somewhere in between. So I will have questions that kind of lead me places you know that sometimes they're just bullet points.
Melissa Milner 12:53
Yes.
Jamie Benning 12:53
Like little touch points to pick up. But never do I try and steer it in a way that sticks to my you know, to any sort of narrative in my head I let it go where it's gonna go occasionally, I edit things a little bit just to make a bit more narrative sense. But for the most part, it's a conversation you know, and if, if I go and talk to you know, I recently spoke to John Patrick Shanley, who is a playwright and director. He won the Oscar for Moonstruck.
Melissa Milner 12:53
Yes.
Jamie Benning 12:53
And he wrote and directed Joe Versus the Volcano. Now a lot of people who follow me on Twitter wanted me to ask him questions about Joe Versus the Volcano but we ended up talking about Doubt which was one of his other films.
Melissa Milner 13:34
Oh my gosh.
Jamie Benning 13:34
A lot more. And I just let it go off in that direction you know, because he seemed to be more passionate about that. I wasn't going to force him into any situation and I also don't ever want to be salacious in my podcast. I'm never trying to dig dirt on people and I think I go to sort of great lengths to put people at ease at the start saying like you know if there's anything you say, and it doesn't come out right just have another go saying it or if you're happy with the fumbling speech I'll leave that in and likewise if you wake up in the middle of the night tonight and you think oh, I shouldn't have said that. Then let me know, you know, I had one guy telling me about his next project and then he realized I'm not supposed to talk about that he was just because we had such a nice conversation going so yeah, and to answer your question, I do have some questions but mostly it's bullet points by also having given the opportunity for my followers on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram to ask a question as well if they have a burning desire to know something but you know, what you do get sometimes you get these really specific questions from from fans, they want to know this tiny little detail because it's been bugging them. And I never really interested in those things. I want it to kind of flow a bit more but yeah, yeah, so a few questions, a few topics. And a few sometimes I draw like a little kind of spider diagram, you know, just little touch points to kind of pick up as we go through and if I miss one, and the hour, hour and a half is kind of elapsed then? Fine. I don't know exactly.
Melissa Milner 15:05
Very cool. Do you have as far as the editing because I edit I edit my podcast and I edit the school student podcast as well? Do you? And again, this is a Walter March thing? Do you do blink of an eye? Do you have this, this is just audio I'm talking about, do you have any hard and fast rules about what to cut and what to keep
Jamie Benning 15:31
attend to with the audio stuff. Because obviously, with video is a completely different thing you're trying to kind of hide edit points would be roll footage and everything else. But with with a podcast, you know, you you can get quite cheeky, you can sort of make people say things that they didn't really say, you know, because you work together. Now, I don't ever want to go down that route. And I know that AI is kind of getting to that point at the moment, which is a kind of a scary, scary future ahead. But for the most of my podcast, I'll edit out some umms and ahs, you know, if it breaks the flow of things, or if that person was struggling to think of something, and I don't want to make them sound as if their memory recall is not there, or I'll get rid of those little sounds that people make, like the little kind of, (tic sound)
Melissa Milner 16:15
Yeah.
Jamie Benning 16:16
And you notice those on the waveform after a while you recognize that person's ums and ahs.
Melissa Milner 16:22
Exactly.
Jamie Benning 16:23
and noises. So I'll chop all of those out, sometimes a bit of silence, but for the most part, I'll leave, you know, 95% of it in there.
Melissa Milner 16:30
Yeah. And it's so funny. I've struggled with the breath. So if it's a big breath, I silence it. But if it's, if it's just a little breath, it's just sounds natural. So I'm like, fighting with myself with the breath.
Jamie Benning 16:44
Yeah, and it's funny how discerning we are as listeners, when we know there's a we can tell when there hasn't been an edit sometimes, because you'll hear a person about to do that intake of breath. But they carry on speaking is it nobody can talk for that long? So you do have to leave those in sometimes because otherwise it just sounds like this. Yeah, this stream of consciousness.
Melissa Milner 17:05
Yeah, that it's so funny. It's like it's you know, I started last summer during the pandemic and, and just my editing has gotten so much better. But I'm still so much on that learning curve. And I want to teach this year I want to teach the students because Audacity is really user friendly, I use Audacity. I want to maybe have like an after school editing club where I don't have to be the only one editing. I think it would be really valuable. And you know, a student like you, you know, it might inspire them to, to go into this kind of work. So that thank you for those... those helpful hints about editing.
Jamie Benning 17:43
Right, yes, I think you know, the more it's like anything, the more you The more you do it, the more you recognize what you have to do, I'm getting quicker and quicker at it. But I have to sort of take that step back and walk out the room and kind of come back in and double check things because it's very easy as well to leave something and you didn't need to leave in or you've just pushed one wrong key and it's chucked something in that you didn't mean to be there. But yeah, just it's ultimately comes down to experience and practice.
Melissa Milner 18:09
Absolutely. And how about editing your writing? So do you write out an entire script for your documentary? How do you do that whole process?
Jamie Benning 18:20
Well, for the filming of entries, the feature length things I kind of the idea of those that's different to any other documentary is that I had this idea back in 2006. I think it was just to lay the movie that I was looking at. So the first one I did was The Empire Strikes Back I called it Building Empire. And I laid the whole movie on a timeline in then it was Final Cut Pro 7, because I wanted to learn Final Cut Pro 7. That was the idea of doing this project and I loved Star Wars movies. And I thought there isn't that much behind the scenes material about Empire. There's a lot about Star Wars and there's a lot about Return of the Jedi but for Empire... I wonder if I could make something so I pulled together all of the stuff that I could find whether it was video whether it was stills behind the scenes stuff that was already out there in documentaries, you know, I would end up going on all these forums and finding out Oh, there was only this one was only released in the Netherlands and this is a documentary that never got released. Just copy of a and you know, I would trade with people so I ended up with this kind of the movie on the sort of bottom layer and then adding these bits in in the context of the movie. So if there was a piece with Luke Skywalker on his TomTom at the start, then I chuck it in there and you end up with this kind of three dimensional puzzle. And then it's a matter of kind of, you know, I would find like five seconds from a documentary in Germany and five seconds from a documentary that aired on Canadian TV and I put them together and go, Oh, I've got like if they overlap a bit, but I've got eight seconds here, you know, there's little bits that slip out of press kits and things so I ended up with this puzzle. So the there was no enough no physical writing. But I suppose in a way is writing in as much as editing is kind of writing I guess. So I would then have the job of what to keep in and what to take out.
Melissa Milner 20:09
So do you not do any voiceover narration?
Jamie Benning 20:13
Not on those I don't know.
Melissa Milner 20:16
Okay.
Jamie Benning 20:17
So they're all kind of historical and current commentary from the people involved in those movies. So I would, you know, beg, borrow and steal stuff from from people's video collections back then then later on I stuff on YouTube. And then I would interview people myself.
Melissa Milner 20:35
You didn't string it together with narration. That's very interesting.
No narration. So the narration is the interviews, whether they're historical ones or current ones with those people's you know, because I like this idea of listening to say, again, Mark Hamill, aged, you know, 27 talking about enthusiastically about The Empire Strikes Back and then 30 odd years later, reflecting back on that time, and yeah, those things together. And if you watch the film kind of unfold,
So your transitions wouldn't be obviously voiceover. They would be maybe music and more film.
Jamie Benning 21:11
Yeah, so yes.
Melissa Milner 21:12
Okay. Gotcha.
It's like you're watching the film being made. Yeah, was the idea. And, you know, with those films, obviously, they're massively popular, and people know the line that's coming next and the musical cue that's coming next. And if I was to put in a, you know, a deleted scene, or an alternate take, that wasn't quite delivered in quite the same way, then it made people kind of sit up and notice, and there have been people that have said, I enjoy watching these more than I enjoy watching the films because...
That's awesome.
Jamie Benning 21:39
Because it's, it's fresh to me, which... Yeah, still amazes me to this day, and, and they've been used educationally as well by there was a chap in I think he's in Canada, who showed his students how you can create a kind of cohesive narrative, you know, pulling from disparate resources, and using and citing my filmumentaries as an example. And that was, you know, that was just as if not more exciting than being interviewed by the New York Times.
Melissa Milner 22:06
Yeah.
Jamie Benning 22:07
I got a real buzz out of the idea that kids are learning from it. Yeah.
Melissa Milner 22:10
Yeah. So I mean, if teachers are listening right now who, I don't even think it has to be high school age, or middle school age, but even fourth graders, it sounds like it starts with the research the gathering and and curating is what I'm hearing from you, you know, and then putting the puzzle pieces together, that's very interesting. Like if you were going to go in and teach fourth graders how to do what you do, what would some of your tips be, or some of the main highlights that you would want to teach students.
Jamie Benning 22:46
With regards to those kind of videos, I would say, have a have a very vague idea of what you want to achieve, but be ready to throw it away. Let the story be found in the editing process, like I came away from that interview with the Ivor Powell, who I mentioned earlier. And with my friend, Patti Tyndall, who shot it for me on a couple of cameras. And I came away from that thinking, I don't know if we've got enough here, Patti, to make something that makes sense. And I didn't start editing it for a couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months. And then I kind of started to delve into it. And as I started to move things around and piece things together and find behind the scenes material that went with it, and some of the B roll that we'd shot because we had him opening old archive boxes of his like scripts, you know, annotated by Ridley Scott and things like that. It then starts to come alive. And then, you know, you take out all those moments of hesitation, you take out all those bits that don't quite work out, you know, on the day, and you suddenly realize, okay, we talked for two hours, but there's a really good 14 minutes here, especially when you add the music and you add the shots of the movies he's talking about, it suddenly comes to life. You know, there's one bit in, in that documentary, or in that short interview, I guess this sort of mini documentaries in the way where he starts to talk about seeing Blade Runner on the big screen for the first time in 30 years, with a live orchestra at the Albert Hall. And as he talks about it, the sun just starts to blaze through this window at the side of him. And with the music the Vangelis music from Blade Runner, it just completely comes alive. You know, he watched it back Ivor and said, you know, he got goose bumps and he said you've managed to articulate the things that I was trying to say.
Melissa Milner 24:36
That's great. Wow.
Jamie Benning 24:38
Which, you know, so yeah, I think the best tip is to kind of, you know, always have a name, but be ready to throw it out because you might find something completely different.
Melissa Milner 24:46
Yes. So interesting. That's exactly what Dave Malkoff said from the Weather Channel. Yeah, it's like it's like you have to be flexible and let the story kind of lead itself and it's so interesting. So you mentioned that you have collaborated, could you just speak to how collaboration has helped you in your work?
Jamie Benning 25:07
Yeah, I think, you know, up until I did the video stuff that I was shooting with my friend, Patrick has done all of them with me. I was, you know, kind of on my own, really, you know, I was okay, seeking advice and kind of information from other people online, and, you know, on forums and things back then. But I was ultimately on my own, with my Final Cut on my old Mac, kind of just trying to do my best, which is kind of what I'm doing now with a podcast. But the difference now is, you know, since Twitter arrived and and, you know, even back when I started, I think Facebook was very much in its infancy, I get feedback from people. And I consider that those people that get feedback collaborators as well, because they're kind of steering me to into which direction to go in sometimes. They're sometimes bringing up a topic that I was unaware of. That's why I give people the opportunity to ask these questions you see, because I might not come up with that same question. And I don't steal their questions. If I have the same question. I just go with it as mine, but if they have something new, then I'll give them the credit for it. But working directly with somebody like Patrick or Patty as, as we call him, he's a very talented cameraman, he's got a very good visual sense. He's, it's his job, you know, he, he works on Formula One with me, he works on bike racing, he works on tennis, he's used to sitting down with, you know, Roger Federer and shooting that, so there'll be a journalist with him. But what he's done over the years with me, he's he's really kind of pulled me along, and he's encouraged me, and he's told me when things have improved, or things have changed, like, when we did that interview with Ivor, he said, that was different. And I said, What do you mean, he said, you were having a proper conversation with him, you were really on your game. You You were meeting him as an equal. He said, that didn't happen before. Because the two or three we'd done before. They were my first and I was kind of, you know, out of the box, just trying to get something on Yes, on film. But what's great about having him there as well. And only from the sort of encouragement and support point of view is that occasionally he'll just kind of go on, what about this? We were talking about this earlier, when you're going to ask him about this. And he'll remind me and nudge me? Oh, yeah, of course, that's because when you're in the thick of it, you know, you're in the thick of it, and you're going through your list of topics or questions that you might have. And suddenly you forget that you might need something to open with, you know, you need an answer from them. That kind of encompasses what you're about to talk about, or you might need something to finish with, where they reflect back on on the sort of legacy of their work. So a few times, he's kind of nudged me in that direction. And I did do a podcast version of that interview with Ivor. So an audio only interview and I included Patty in it. So when he's kind of asking the question, you know, this is the thing, it's not about me. And doing this stuff. It's never about me. I want to give people the chance to talk about their, their legacy and to talk about their careers. I tend to well I try my best not to kind of interrupt them. I've listened to a lot of interviews and podcasts over the years where you'll hear the interviewee just about to say something, and the interviewer cuts in, because they know what that person is going to say. And they're kind of showing off that they have that knowledge.
Melissa Milner 28:33
Yeah.
Jamie Benning 28:34
So they might say, Oh, of course, and then I worked with Stanley Kubrick and x y Zed happened and, and the interviewer will come in and start telling that story. No, leave the interviewee to tell that story. That's why you're there, you know, that it's kind of a bit of peacocking in a way people are kind of showing off that they have that knowledge. I I there's you know, I've had conversations with people where I know exactly what they're talking about, because I've done my research, but I'm not about to jump in and tell them that I know that because I want them to tell that to the listeners. It's their story. It's about them.
Melissa Milner 29:08
That's so that's such a great, I'm just thinking of all these great things you're saying that I'm going to share with my students. I just I'm so excited. What are you zooming in on right now in your work?
Jamie Benning 29:23
Currently, at the moment, this is our kind of summer break on the Formula One motor racing, so generally, August is a three and a half week, gap summer gap because it's you know, pretty relentless. We've had some triple headers, meaning that we've worked Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, 12 hours a day, with a few days to recover in between. So we have I think 21 rounds this year. So the next race will be in Belgium. But now I'm doing things remotely. I'm very fortunate in that I only have to commute 25 minutes on my push bike on my cycle, head to work now rather than travel the world, I miss traveling but I'm very lucky to have work so locally and apart from that kind of, you know, paid bread and butter work with Formula One. I do also do a bit of training myself, I train people on one of the live editing tools that we have, which is called an EBS it's often used in sports TV, but also in all sorts of TV. So I've been training people on that for 2007, I think I started so yeah, 14 years. And now what they call an ambassador,
Melissa Milner 30:33
You get paid to train from that company.
Jamie Benning 30:37
Yes, so I go and visit their headquarters. People come from all over Europe. So they have a office in the UK, they have one in Liege in Belgium, which is just kind of an hour outside Brussels. So I've trained probably hundreds of people over the years, some have made it some have not cut the mustard, despite our best efforts. But also during lockdown. I had an idea to kind of do these video tutorials for them whilst we were unable to do any sort of face to face work. So I've been lucky enough to be sent a bunch of equipment by them. And I have an installation in my office, which I use to train people over the internet. Now we're going back to face to face training next month.
Melissa Milner 31:22
All right, so you do some teaching.
Jamie Benning 31:25
I do I do. You know what it was something that I never imagined I could do it there, there are people that do the job that I do and they're far more skilled than me like I, I, the department I work in, we do the replays and the highlights and the sort of video insert into into the shows. Now I am operator, I'm an editor, but I'm also a coordinator. So I sometimes coordinate a department of kind of eight or 10 people on this kind of live seat of your pants editing. I do a little bit of directing as well. But I never thought I would be able to teach people how to do but one of the guys who worked at UBS, he just said to me, actually, Jamie, I think you're really good communicator, I think you should do this. And I was I was you know, I'm, I've come out of it, I think now but I was a very shy person well into my 30s I still am now and again. But it really kind of opened up my horizons to be able to recognize that I could stand in front of a room of just four people, four or five people, but acknowledge that I have knowledge and experience that they don't have and that I'm able to communicate it in a way that they're able to understand.
Melissa Milner 32:35
Yes. Yeah.
Jamie Benning 32:36
I was quite surprised at that. So that has kind of fed into what I've done elsewhere you know, with my, with my paid what other paid work and with my podcast and my videos as well definitely.
Melissa Milner 32:48
That's amazing. So were you able to take you know, all that you do and figure out how to scaffold it for these new people learning it?
Jamie Benning 32:56
Yeah, that's it. So we put together like a two day and a three day course there's a basic course and there's an advanced course so they can return after getting some experience and look at the advanced features. Two days is not very long to learn it but it's it's enough to give you a foundation and enough to give you an idea to kind of see if it is what you want to do because some people just can't handle the stress of thinking about you know, in the case of Formula One 350 million viewers around the world live people you tell somebody to press play on something or do a replay or edit a couple of shots together, they just panic you know. Other people are kind of wired to do it they just come in and doesn't doesn't faze them doesn't bother them you know, if I if they're if they're nervous and and shaking in the training room, then they're probably not going to survive the real environment when there's a director shouting down your neck that they want it now so it's a very sort of
Melissa Milner 33:55
That's..
Jamie Benning 33:55
Yeah.
Melissa Milner 33:56
Fascinating.
Jamie Benning 33:57
You know, part of my job as well is to kind of bolster them so that they are part of my job as a trainer is to bolster the trainees so that they all of that stuff can come later, you know, now just focus on letting it become second nature, you know, where you when and where and how you need to do these particular operations with the equipment, and then when they become second nature, if someone's shutting down your neck, then you can still do it. It's like you know, when we when we drive we sometimes forget, though, we're driving in a way you know, right? We're focusing on the road but we don't think about in the case in Europe of shifting gears and using the clutch and steering and everything else. We just do it it becomes second nature.
Melissa Milner 34:41
You are so talking teacher right now I am so so so impressed
Jamie Benning 34:48
The thing I would say as well about the the teaching is that I've always had this kind of drive, not to just retain and hide my knowledge from people. If I've got knowledge on something, I don't feel threatened by telling somebody else what knowledge I have. You know, when I first started doing my training, I got quite a lot of aggravation aggravated people in my industry saying you are teaching somebody how to do my job, how dare you said, well, you have to be comfortable that you're good at what you do, and you've got a good client base, and they want you back. New people are going to arrive in the industry, no matter what, no matter what happens, I would rather work with people who've been told the right things, right. So I think I think passing on knowledge, passing on wisdom is an important thing, because I think you get to a certain age, and I think it probably happened in my late 30s, early 40s, that you, like I said earlier, you suddenly realize, you know, a whole bunch of stuff that other people don't know. And what's the what's the advantage of kind of holding that in and not letting anybody know about it?
Melissa Milner 35:58
That's beautifully said, Wow. How can people contact you and see more of your work.
Jamie Benning 36:06
So if you go on Twitter, I'm on Jamie SWB, it did stand for Star Wars Begins, which was the name of my 1977 Star Wars documentary thing. And on Facebook, there's a Filmumentaries page on Vimeo there's a Filmumentaries page and just this morning, I've been sort of sorting out my YouTube channel because it was full of like, archival bits and bobs and ultimately, I can't monetize it in any way. So I've decided to remove all of the copyrighted stuff and just upload my originally creative material which is kind of my podcast as well because I know that not everybody wants to go on Spotify or Apple or Google to listen to podcasts. I know my parents don't they would rather just hit play on YouTube on Facebook so I'm trying to sort of cover all areas so if you search for Jamie Benning, or you search for Filmumentaries then you'll find me.
Melissa Milner 36:59
Excellent I'm sure people are gonna be checking those out. So I ask this of every person I interview but I think it'll be really interesting to hear from you. What's your favorite movie and why?
Jamie Benning 37:14
It's very difficult isn't it to pin down favorite movies. I mean, you know Star Wars was massive for me as a kid it was the first time that I wanted to live in in that in a in another world you know in another universe that felt like it could be real aged three or four or whatever I was back then. But it was also the first film that turned me on to the idea that hang on films are made people make these like they don't just appear out of nowhere. So that film does mean a lot to me. I mean I haven't watched it probably in a number of years now. But I would say The Empire Strikes Back is probably up there.
Melissa Milner 37:46
Oh yeah.
Jamie Benning 37:47
I also adore jaws and Raiders The Lost Ark hence doing the the Filmumentaries on them so they're in the top three but you can jumble the order depending on what day of the week it is.
Melissa Milner 37:58
Yeah, I mean, we grew up around the saying I was a little older when those movies were coming out. But yeah, they had the same effect on me. You know my number one of all time is Jaws for for many different reasons. So I am with you. Raiders. I remember going to see that with my grandmother and I was scared and she wasn't scared. I'm like, Okay, I'm not supposed to be scared when things like this happen. Like she helped me not be scared at movies. It was great.
Jamie Benning 38:25
That's a good cinema, buddy.
Melissa Milner 38:27
Yeah. Thank you so much, Jamie, for taking the time out to talk to me.
Jamie Benning 38:32
Well, thanks, Melissa. It's been really nice talking to you.
Melissa Milner 38:35
If you enjoyed this episode, and have not done so already, please hit the subscribe button for The Teacher As... podcast so you can get future episodes. I would love for you to leave a review and a rating as well if you have time. For my blog, transcripts of this episode, and links to any resources mentioned visit my website at www.theteacheras.com You can reach me on Twitter and Instagram at Melissa B Milner, and I hope you check out The Teacher As... Facebook page for episode updates. I am sending a special thanks to Linda and Lester Fleishman, my mom and dad, for being so supportive. They are the voices you hear in the Zooming In soundbite and my dad composed and performed the background music you are listening to right now. My intro music was Upbeat Party by Scott Holmes. So what are you zooming in on? I would love to hear from you. My hope is that we all share what we are doing in the classroom in order to teach, remind, affirm and inspire each other. Thanks for listening. And that's a wrap.