Part of the Glue

I lead a drama/media team of teenagers at my church.  Every once in a while I feel a need to accomplish something BIG together.  We find projects that our bigger than ourselves and take up an entire weekend or numerous saturdays…but everyone rallies together and we accomplish it.  I like the story in the gospels when Jesus is speaking to the five thousand and his disciples come to him saying the people are hungry.  Jesus says "You feed them"  Jesus is calling the disciples with their limited resources "five loaves and two fish" to perform a miracle.  He is calling them to depend on His resources to do something unthinkable. This year I decided to challenge our student drama/media team to participate in one of the largest christian film competitions in the US….the 168 Film Project.   We will have 168 hours to write, shoot and edit a 11 minute short film based on a bible verse.  Check out the film below we did two years ago.

Recently we started creating a series of videos that would help promote a program in our youth ministry called FUZE.  We shot the below video on a green screen and did one simple take. Students loved the video and it didn’t take a long time to produce because it depended mostly on the characters improv abilities.  A lot of times videos we create are scripted and have lots of angles in various locations …occasionally its good to mix it up and do something very very simple.

We recently created a video called "the tale of Johnny Rattleweed".  The premise behind the film was to create a fairy tale that would explain the concept of skeletons in your closet in a fun and creative way.  We bought a bunch of skeletons from a local haloween store and shot with the new sony fs100.

We recently launched our small group ministry in our student ministry.  We call them D_Group or Discipleship Groups and run from August to May.  We decided to create a series of promotional videos to encourage students to give them a try.

I know often times when you hear MTV….you think bad…..you think negative and anything offensive. Truth is you would probably think right, but one thing that MTV does understand very very well is youth culture.  While doing some research for some upcoming programs I watched some clips from the UK series SKINS, which is now a MTV USA series.  One of the things I noticed when watching this was that the students often talked on their cell phones more than they talked in real life.  Now I know this to be true and don’t need a tv show to tell me this, however the idea of showing students talking on their cell phones on video was a new concept that I stole from watching this series.  This gave us the idea for the following promo for a video we showed to promote a new event we call FUZE.  Check it out.

This year we decided to create a movie trailer for our two summer events. We hired a voice from voices.com and downloaded some after effects templates from revostock.com to aid in the creation process.  We had great response from the video that encouraged students to sign up sooner than later.

Below is the video I shot when I was in honduras this spring break with some students from our student ministry.  Everything was shot on the canon 7d and the gopro.

Last week I had the opportunity to fly to Honduras and shoot a mission trip for our church. During the trip my primary responsibility was to photograph and video the entire trip.

Here is what I brought.

1. Canon 7D (this camera is perfect for the job, because you can show hi-quality video and pictures at the same time without toting around multiple cameras)

2. 24mm-70mm Zoom Lens (having a really nice zoom lens made it easy to have a variety of shots without having to switch out lenses all the time.

3. Go Pro (we bought this just for the trip and came in perfect for when we took our free day and went snorkeling and white-water rafting….I was able to suction cup the camera to the front of the boat and never lost it thankfully)

4. ZOOM H4N (used this device to record all of our audio from the boom mic we brought)

5. Rycote Wind Screen (came in really handy when we were shooting audio against really high wind-speeds

6. headphones

7. monopod/small tripod (the monopod came in really handy when I was walking around most of the day

After coming back from the trip there was one thing I wish I would have brought.
Digital Photo Printer (Having this would have allowed me to take pictures of the kids there and print their pictures on-spot and give them to them. This is a great way to minister since a lot of the people have never owned a photo of themselves.)
2.

Last year I took a group of students to see To Save a Life. Afterwards we went to starbucks and sat around and talked about the implications of the movie and looked at our own lives to see if we were anything like the characters in the movie. It was one of the few movies that had a Christian message that was well executed that actually got these teenagers thinking.

This year another great movie is coming in April…Soul Surfer.

If you work or volunteer at a church you should check out their resource website HERE.

Back in the spring of this year, Simply Youth Ministry partnered with Worship House Media to bring together a store that would focus entirely on youth ministry.  You can check out their website here.   While on the store, you might also check out one of my favorite producers Radiant First Productions (hint shameless plug).