After many technical difficulties, Great Microbiologists is finished and ready for download at my movies page

http://www.revmen.com/movies.htm

The smallest version I have available at this time is 16.1 MB, but I’ll make a smaller one soon and update this post when I have it uploaded. It’s nearly 9 minutes long, almost all of it animated, so there’s not gonna be a way to knock this one down to a couple megs and maintain any semblence of quality.

This film was created to commemorate my girlfriend Libby’s graduation from Colorado State University with a microbiology degree and her acceptance into medical school, although she was finally accepted after I had completed most of the film. The primary purpose of Great Microbiologists was to be shown at the party thrown by Libby and her friend Katie. Quite a number of faculty from the Microbiology Department showed up, as well as other students from that department. So that was the reason the subject of great microbiologists was chosen, and that will need to be kept in mind while viewing the film. You will also need to keep in mind that it was designed for a specific set of people, and so a couple of the characters will have names or behaviors that are meaningless to anyone who is not familiar with them. Primarily this will be Libby and Katie, as well as their other friend April, who also graduated and has landed a marvelous job as a professional bird trainer.

I tried to be funny and historically accurate at the same time. I did a lot of research to try and find some points to touch on, and discovered two of the more important characters in the history of this particular science. I also discovered that microbiology is an extremely unfunny subject, and to produce some humorous material in this realm was a major undertaking. I admit that some of the jokes are really reaching and may not be understood after one or even two watchings.

The film is also somewhat informative, and therefore may be a bit boring in spots. I did try to put some action in the background whenever the narrator was talking about some of the more boring stuff, so for the most part there’s always something at least mildly entertaining going on. But the fact still remains that the primary subject of the film is microbiology, and there’s really no getting around some amount of dryness.

Great Microbiologists was very well received at the party and several professors mentioned classes that they’d like to see it shown in. Perhaps GM or a close version of it will become a common tool used by introductory micro teachers every semester. Hopefully you’ll all enjoy it as well, and possibly even learn something while you’re at it.

Special thanks to wandrer and Lowweek for providing voices for the two historical figures covered. I think their contributions are the most notable part of this film.