Norman Bean

Norman Bean (born November 12, 1925 in La Crosse , Wisconsin ) is an American cameraman and documentary filmmaker .

Life

Bean grew up on a game ranch and served in the United States Army Air Corps during World War II . After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree, he spent twelve years teaching high school biology in the United School District of Los Angeles .

From 1953 he began to work as a professional filmmaker. He shot material for four films in the Coco series by the Pathway Productions studio. While making short educational films, he continued teaching. In 1960 he began working with Paul Burnford and the production company Film Associates (later BFA Educational Media). He experimented with close-ups of insects that were chilled before shooting, which slowed their metabolism and prevented them from flying or jumping. This enabled Bean to get detailed images of moving body parts, as in 1978 in Spiders: Backyard Science . In the film Frogs: An Investigation (1972) he used the slow motion technique to emphasize the popping out of the tongue when catching insects.

In addition to his work for the BFA, Bean has made films for CBS , Encyclopaedia Britannica , McGraw-Hill , Aims Media, the San Pasqual Academy, National Geographic Society , Sutherland and Rampart Productions. He also made six travel films about Alaska, Glacier National Park, the Bahamas, the Amazon, Mexico, and the Canadian coastal areas, and four series of films about elementary learning skills.

Bean's filmography includes over 100 educational films aimed primarily at young students, including eighteen English-language films made in collaboration with his former wife Marjorie Bean. The large-scale production The Mating of Animals from 1974 used insect photographs from Bean.

Filmography (selection)

• Farm Babies and their Mothers, 1954
• Bahama Cruise, 1961
• Amazon: Life Along the River in Peru, 1962
• Animals See in Many Ways, 1962
• Animals Breathe in Many Ways, 1963
• Flies and Mosquitoes: their Life Cycle and Control, 1964
• Insects That Help Us, 1965
• Insect Metamorphosis: Backyard Science, 1966
• Crickets: Backyard Science, 1967
• Frogs: An Investigation, 1972
• The Mating of Animals (Birds Do It, Bees Do It) , 1974
• Spiders: Backyard Science, 1978
• Plants of the Sea, 1980
• Geoffrey's Animal Alphabet, 1985

Web links

• Norman Bean in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Short biography and filmography in the Academic Film Archive
• Literature by and about Norman Bean in the WorldCat bibliographic database