This Week on NFB.ca: Oceans, Education, and Creating Good Global Citizens

This week, we launched Ocean School, our new interactive educational platform. Ocean School provides students with the opportunity to venture beyond the classroom into the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through immersive video and augmented reality.

Guided by their own curiosity, these students will develop an understanding of ocean science. They’ll also acquire the tools to become good global citizens.

Our environment, and the preservation of our oceans, has always been a big theme for NFB filmmakers. This week, in honour of Ocean School’s launch, we featured three films about the ocean.

Deep Threat

While this isn’t exactly the type of material you’ll find in Ocean School, it will provide you with an amusing yet educational 10 minutes. This animated short shows how human evolved from the sea, and all the havoc that wreaked on our ecosystems. It’s a long trip in a very short amount of time.

Deep Threat, Zlatko Grgic, provided by the National Film Board of Canada

Debris

Meet Pete Clarkson, a BC artist with an entirely different view of the ocean. Rather than studying the life that exists within it, he makes art from the debris it expels. Here, Clarkson turns his attention and creativity to the objects that washed ashore after the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami.

Debris, John Bolton, provided by the National Film Board of Canada

Arctic IV

Watch as Dr. MacInnis and his team chip through over 2 metres of ice to dive into the icy depths of the waters at Resolute Bay. Specialists in underwater medicine, they probe the depths in the name of science. It’s an incredible glimpse at an unfamiliar world.

Arctic IV, James de B. Domville, provided by the National Film Board of Canada

World Teacher Day

We also celebrated World Teacher Day on October 5, with the following two films.

Flamenco at 5:15

Susana and Antonio Robledo were two world-renowned dance teachers from Spain, and this Oscar®-winning short demonstrates why. Enjoy this brief glimpse of their artistry as they give a class to students at the National Ballet School of Canada.

Flamenco at 5:15, Cynthia Scott, provided by the National Film Board of Canada

Film Club

This short doc shows how one great teacher can affect many lives. It’s the story of how a Grade 8 educator formed a film club to pass along his love of cinema to his students. He ended up providing them with something far more special.