"I USED TO MAKE terrible films," Brown said as we hiked through rainforest on our first day up the mountain. "I'd go to beautiful places with incredible athletes, and then I'd record wall-to-wall narration. I'd make this film that was really painful to watch, and I couldn't understand why I wasn't getting into film festivals." He started his adventure-film school in hopes of saving neophyte directors—and their audiences—from his early mistakes.

Tall and lithe, with the strength of well-woven rope, Brown wears wonkish spectacles and a goofy grin that slides down the corner of his mouth. He looks like a swashbuckling librarian. He's filmed on Everest eight times, four of which were successful summit bids. During his most recent Everest trip he spent five and a half days above 26,000 feet, helped rescue two people, summited, and shot an Imax movie. Brown's best-known film is Farther Than the Eye Can See, about blind climber Erik Weihenmayer's Everest summit in 2001. "It's so difficult to film and climb," says nine-time Everest summiter and guide Dave Hahn. "Michael is among the best. He has a lot of patience."

Our film school—composed of Brown, 27-year-old Serac producer Ryan Ross, two other film students, and me—had three stages: three days of planning in Arusha, six days on the mountain, and three days of postproduction and editing in Boulder. In Tanzania, we met our guide, Jeff Evans, founder of the Boulder-based guide com­pany Mountain­Vision, and the five other climbers he would lead. Sitting in our hotel's restaurant on the first day, Brown told us that as members of the film school we had to work as a team and then asked us to outline our projects.

Unlike me, the other guys had clear goals. "I want to make a film that contrasts mountain climbing with what I see every day in New York," explained Emeka Ngwube about his project, "New Yorkers' Guide to Climbing Mountains." As an Ironman triathlete, the 40-year-old Frenchman, who works for Credit Suisse Group in Manhattan, was attracted to the physical demands of mountain climbing. He'd picked up film as a hobby in graduate school in France and had come to Tanzania with a bookful of notes.

Josh Levine, an independent film producer from Manhattan, had real cinematic experience. The 29-year-old's most recent project, 5 Up 2 Down, was a feature-length narrative about two friends on a five-day cocaine freebase binge who realize they know each other from a past life. Adventure filmmaking wasn't the obvious progression. "I wanted to step outside of what I was doing," Levine said.

Levine's Kili project was about climber Bill Barkeley, a 46-year-old with Usher syndrome, a condition that has left him legally deaf and blind. Doctors predict that Barkeley, director of marketing for a Michigan-based office-furniture company, will eventually lose his sight completely. He considers Kilimanjaro part of a transformative process in which he hopes to become an advocate for the deaf and blind. "When the caterpillar thinks it's going to die," the father of three told us on the mountain, "it becomes a butterfly."

All we had to do was catch that on tape.