I just read an interesting blog post by Randy Olson, scientist-turned-filmmaker and author of the book Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style. Olson teaches three-day filmmaking workshops for science students, and he just finished his most recent one in Norway… Read the blog post and you can see the resulting short films (there are 5 of them from a group of 25 students, and each film is just 1 minute long) .

Some of the products are pretty impressive given the length of the workshop and the students’ lack of prior training. The whole workshop is just 3 days — that means the students are learning about filmmaking and creating their film in <72 hours. Pretty wild! Olson also provides the “” for his workshops, so anyone can adapt his methods for themselves. This is worth a read, too.

On a related note, Colin Bates and Jeff Morales have just updated the website for their excellent “Scientific Filmmaking” workshop series (I participated in the October 2010 workshop at Bodega Marine Lab, and it was really excellent!). See the new website and find out about upcoming workshops here.

And finally, as I mentioned last week, there were several video-related events at the ScienceOnline2011 meeting in North Carolina. and Joanne Manaster led a workshop about how to create your own high-quality science videos. Then, Clifton Wiens of National Geographic Television led a session about what television producers want to see in science programming (and how to pitch to television executives). And finally, Carin and Joanne presented a mini film festival, where the audience got to watch a smattering of recent short videos sampled from throughout the science blogosphere.

I learned about Colin and Jeff’s course a couple of months before it happened, I found out about the ScienceOnline2011 events shortly thereafter, and I just discovered Randy Olson’s workshops a few days ago. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty excited to see that there now exist several programs for teaching scientists how to communicate through video. The demand for such workshops indicates to me that scientists – at least the younger generation of current graduate students and post-docs – are feeling the need for better communication with the public. And I think that’s a good thing!