Lights! Camera! Action! That’s what ten aspiring teenage filmmakers from the Perkins School for the Blind have turned their talents to after Emmy-award winning Kevin Bright, former producer of Friends, took them on as students in a breakthrough collaboration, according to a story in the Boston Globe.
The Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Mass. is best known as the alma mater of Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan but it may soon become the incubator school for the film industry since Bright is about to enter their first short film Seeing Through the Lens into the first festival for the visually-impaired called Cinema Without Sight, created by the Braille Institute, a California-based service organization for the blind.
After years of producing shows in L.A. such as In Living Color, Bright was invited to teach at his own alma mater Emerson College in Boston three years ago. He was so impressed with the Perkins School Choir he saw perform at a Boston Celtics game, he donated $1,000 to the school and was invited to tour it. It was there that he saw a framed letter on the wall written in perfect penmanship by Helen Keller. “If Helen Keller could write that letter, I knew a blind person could make a movie,” Bright told the Globe. Bright has figured out adaptive techniques for his sight-impaired students, such as using a cane to measure the distance between camera and subject. His students range in age from 17 to 20 and created a short film about the friendship between three girls at Perkins.
Of course no one knows if their first foray into film will be award-winning, but it seems the remarkable story of this collaboration could be the material for a film screenplay for next year’s submission.
Photo by kevin.corcoran via Flickr.