Freshman Michael Burdick, left, plays the character Clotaire in the film "The Horrible Life of Clotaire," which won a competition; classmate Tucker Brown, right, plays Agnan.

Durham, NC - The Petit Nicholas French children stories have entertained generations of French children and helped many Americans learn the French language. But not too many readers paid much attention to a secondary character named Clotaire, a misfit boy who gets bad grades.

Nobody cared, that is, until a team of Duke students started thinking about what happens to the adult Clotaire. The result was a video, "La Vie Horrible de Clotaire" ("The Horrible Life of Clotaire"), which won first prize in a November film competition for second-year French students sponsored by the Department of Romance Studies. (Watch the film with Quicktime.)

Clotaire is a secondary character in the Petit Nicholas children's series, who gets bad grades and doesn't have many friends.

"We got a lot of laughs," said freshman Michael Burdick who played Clotaire in the student film and was selected best male actor. "I don't think any of us are really, really serious people; we all have a good sense of humor and so we were just trying to put that into the movie."

Burdick's teammates Tucker Brown, Kristin Kramers and Jack Taylor played supporting roles in the film. All the students worked on the script and production of their nine-minute short.

"Clotaire" was screened as part of a mock Cannes Film Festival complete with paparazzi, a red carpet and sparkling cider in a lecture hall, and attended by the nearly 100 students taking French 76. A jury of French language faculty selected the film as best in show, a prize that comes with dinner for four donated by the local gourmet French restaurant Vin Rouge.

Romance studies professor Deb Reisinger said the unusual assignment was part of an instructional method that uses technology to introduce language through written, visual and auditory media.

Freshman Michael Burdick plays Clotaire in the student film "The Horrible Life of Clotaire," which imagines the adult Clotaire's demise. The film won a competition among second-year French classes. Watch the film with Quicktime.

"They had been working with representation in different media throughout the whole semester -- so they would read a text and then listen to it; or they'd read a text and then watch a clip of its cinematic adaptation," said Reisinger, who had the students use iPod video and music players to practice pronunciation and watch film clips. "This project really builds on that idea."

The winning film opens with an adult Clotaire sitting in a trash can reflecting on the mishaps that began in the elementary school class described in the Petit Nicholas books. In the film scenes chronicling his life, Clotaire flunks class, witnesses his pet dog's death, gets arrested, is chewed out by his boss and misses his chance with a girl, all before his untimely end.

Scripting Clotaire's unfortunate life called for an informal French the students said they didn't often get practice in other assignments.

"In class we are very formal with language," said Kramers, a sophomore who plays Clotaire's teacher and the police officer who arrests him. "In the film, we were more casual, like with the ‘Buvez! Buvez!' scene." (Clotaire is encouraged to "Drink! Drink!" moments before police arrive at a party.)

Mingled with the humor are allusions to books and films studied in the course, the students said.

"Pretty much every scene is a reference to something we read in class," Brown said.

One of the biggest challenges of the assignment was learning digital video technology, which kept them up until 3 a.m. the night before it was due, the students said.

"The DVD didn't burn that night, so Kristin and I woke up early the morning it was due to ask for help on how to burn it," Taylor said. "We burned the DVD actually 30 minutes before it was due in class."

The project is supported by a grant from the Duke Digital Initiative and assistance was provided by Duke's Center for Instructional Technology.