What’s it like to go blind?
by Beth
Screenshot of my YouTube debut
Early in September, four creative and energetic young guys showed up at our apartment door armed with audio equipment and cameras, and now, just one month later, you can already see what all the fuss was about.
Craig Benzine was one of those creative guys at my door. He conducted my interview, and it appears on a new YouTube channel called The Good Stuff. Craig is very familiar with YouTube: he already has an uber-popular vlog there called Wheezy Waiter that has half a million followers. In a blog post on Wheezy Waiter, he explained why he decided to start The Good Stuff channel now, too:
“There’s this type of entertainment I enjoy that I can only really find in podcast form, specifically from the shows Radiolab and This American Life. They take a topic and delve into it from all sides. That could be short stories, news stories, stand up comedy, interviews, etc. These shows give me a certain feeling when I’m done listening to them that I really don’t find much on YouTube. I guess it’s sort of a feeling that everything’s connected and you can find interesting things and people everywhere you look. With The Good Stuff, we’re attempting to get at that feeling, at least a little, and do it with video.”
The theme for the current segment on The Good Stuff is Senses. Before shooting a single frame for the “What’s it Like to Go Blind” segment, Craig and fellow Good Stuff staff members Sam Grant, Matt Weber and David Wolff spent nearly an hour figuring out the ideal way to film inside our apartment, which angle to shoot from and where the lighting would look best. My husband can see, and from what he says, their fussiness was worth it. “They make our apartment look great!” he marveled.
The Good Stuff puts tons of time and scientific research into all its video segments, and this one does not disappoint. My husband and I huddled together in front of his iPad so he could described some of the graphics out loud to me. My fave? The inside of an eyeball. It shows up on screen while I explain retinopathy (the disease that caused my blindness). The filmmakers got down on Whitney’s level to film shots of her working outside, and the film fades to black at appropriate times while I try to explain how I picture things I can’t see.
The video sounds good, too. Mischievous music that sounds like it’s from a Three Stooges episode plays while I take Whitney out to “empty,” and if you listen closely you’ll hear me playing Duke Ellington’s C Jam Blues on the piano for a few seconds, too.
But wait. Why describe all this to you? You all can watch it: