“I’ve always loved video making, mostly silly comedy stuff,” says Craig Benzine ’03. “It’s a cliché story at this point: growing up with your parents’ camera, messing around with it, and making short little funny things.”
Benzine is a YouTuber and filmmaker based in Madison. He has a degree in communication arts from the UW and has spent nearly 20 years making YouTube videos as WheezyWaiter. Benzine also produces a newsletter and podcast called Tuesbetter on Substack, and he hosted the series U.S. Government and Politics on the popular educational YouTube channel Crash Course.
In 2025, Benzine released his first feature-length film: No Packers, No Life, a documentary that follows a group of Green Bay Packers fans from Japan as they travel to Lambeau Field for a Packers game. The documentary is currently free to stream on Tubi.
“It’s a fun road-trip movie, although it’s an airplane trip,” Benzine says. “It’s just a fun time. It’s showcasing how people from other sides of the world can come together around a common passion.”
Here’s how Benzine directed his first feature-length film — and his guide to turning your ideas into reality.
Say yes to new opportunities.
When Benzine’s longtime friend Ty Morse approached him to take the lead on the documentary, he was initially hesitant to take the job. As a full-time YouTuber, Benzine turned down the project, at first, because he didn’t have the availability in his schedule. However, he knew this was a story he wanted to tell.
“He recruited me because he knew that I make videos,” he says. “Even though I was very interested in the project, I just didn’t think I’d have time, but I eventually said yes. Then, I slowly worked on it over many years — because it really turned out I didn’t have time — but I did slowly put it together to eventually get it done.”
“The Packers can inspire such fandom from across the world,” Benzine says. “That interested me, because I grew up in Wisconsin, and I wanted to understand what makes this place special — the idea that people can share a similar passion from the other side of the world.”
Take on a challenge.
Benzine says he enjoyed taking on the challenge of telling a travel story in the documentary, piecing together hours of footage to create a compelling narrative that spanned the globe.
“I tried to make something that felt like they were going on a trip,” he says, “on an actual journey across the world, and I was interested in that challenge — to try to tell that kind of story.”
Create a routine and stick to it.
To complete the film, Benzine decided to dedicate more time and energy to the project — setting goals to stay motivated and to keep progress on track.
“I had a ton of footage, so the process first was similar to what I do with interviews for my YouTube channel. It’s a process of whittling,” he says. “I watch the footage, and I edit while I’m watching. I put it in a timeline, and I’ll whittle it down.”
After deciding on the main themes of the documentary, Benzine took four months away from YouTube to focus on finishing the movie. Every day, he added at least two minutes to the running time of the film until the documentary was complete.
Learn from your work and get started on what’s next.
The documentary premiered at the Wisconsin Film Festival in spring of 2025 at the Barrymore Theatre. “It was one of the best nights of my life,” Benzine says. “To be in the room of people that loved it, that laughed at all the right parts — it felt like I did my job.”
The film went on to show at the Green Bay Film Festival, where it won Best Film. It was picked up by the producers who made Just a Bit Outside: The Story of the 1982 Milwaukee Brewers, and the film debuted in Marcus Theatres in October.
Benzine says working on this project has made him a better filmmaker and prepared him to take on more feature-length films in the future, like the original screenplay he’s currently developing. “I’ve gotten better and more comfortable with massive amounts of footage. I’m more confident that I can handle it, and I know that the process that I did worked, so I can do that again.”
“In the future, I definitely want to make fictional movies,” Benzine says. “But I never thought I was going to be a documentarian, and I’d love to do another big documentary project, if the right idea hits me.”
