Eye - 27 January 2012

Viral videos to archive delving

Friends video goes viral

Friends’ School Lisburn, in Northern Ireland, has produced a zany promotional video that is attracting hundreds of thousands of hits on Youtube.

The video has caused a stir in the country, with coverage on the front pages of the main newspapers, the leading television news programmes, the Stephen Nolan show on national network BBC Radio 5 Live and even in the local marketing press.

The word in ‘Norn Ireland’, summing up the amazing reaction to the video, is: ‘it just went viral!’

The video features more than a thousand students and staff and involves a continuous ‘steadicam’ shot in which the camera moves through the school corridors, up stairwells, into the main lecture room (focus for Ireland Yearly Meeting every few years) and then continues to a creative conclusion.

Film buffs will recognize a homage to Aleksandr Sokurov’s ground-breaking 2002 film Russian Ark.

A Northern Irish marketing company said that ‘the absence of a huge marketing budget was no barrier to the students and staff at the school – who substituted cash for an altogether more valuable asset: imagination’. They also described it as ‘one of the best examples of viral marketing we have ever seen’.

This time, however, the video is not marketing a commercial product, such as a car or a computer, but the benefits of attending a Quaker school founded in the late eighteenth century.

The video can be seen on the Friends School Lisburn website: www.friendsschoollisburn.org.uk

Yea, nay, er…

Rachel Howell of South Edinburgh Meeting has written to Eye describing her foray into old copies of the Friend.

She chanced upon the issue of 2 September 1966 and writes: ‘One of the letters mentioned an article in Young Quaker which the letter-writer said “has put into forceful language two thoughts which have often occurred to me when reading correspondence in the Friend. (1) Once again we are told that there is a lot wrong with Quakerism. So let’s all get round and have a jolly good moan about it. Quite soon, I feel, our Society will come to resemble a lot of malingerers in a doctor’s waiting room with nothing to talk of but their ailments. (2) The no-creed, no-label, don’t-pin-me-down attitude is all very well, but I think Friends have got pathological about it. If we are not careful both our yea and our nay will turn to er.”’

‘I’m delighted to say (1) has never occurred to me about the Religious Society of Friends. Point (2) made me smile and suggests that certain topics recur and recur in the letters pages… Earlier in the magazine the then-editor of the Friend mentions that he had been reading a copy from a hundred years previously, which included an editor’s footnote on the correspondence page beginning: “We insert the above letter with the view of keeping a most important subject before the attention of our readers – not as an invitation to renewed controversy upon it in these columns.” It wouldn’t surprise me if the “much-debated” topic of 155 years ago was something still debated today!’

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