Funk Babblings

Last Friday night we saw Mad Hot Ballroom, a documentary following three classes of fifth-grade kids in a program in the New York City schools to teach ballroom dancing to inner-city kids, and the kids' path to and through the all-district competition.

It was a really fun film, but a few extra things struck me while watching it....

- I was imagining a huge TV or movie camera in the classrooms filming this thing, but that would never have worked. I had to remind myself that this is the age of digital video, with small unobtrusive cameras that the subjects probably barely noticed.

- A big deal was made about how the program seems to help the kids who do well (e.g. the ones who make it to the final competition), but the ones who didn't do so well seemed forgotten.

- The film does a great job of storytelling, building suspense about how the kids will do in the final competition, which made me think about how much extra video had to be recorded of how many classes in order to piece together a compelling storyline of three classes. In this vein, I noted that one of the first credits to appear at the end (if not the first) was a writer credit.