Busy Week

Last week I did two overlapping jobs in an eight day stretch. The first was a corporate show and I did 30 hours in four days. The second was so many hours I lost track. It was interviews and documentary footage for a set of videos on high school evangelistic ministry. The client was the guy who started and directed Student Venture, the high school ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ for many years. We were shooting stories surrounding a campus ministry at a high school that has been remarkably effective with some really unusual stories.

We ran two cameras most of the time and the interviews went on for hours at a time. That kind of thing really burns through the tape. We shot 46 hours of tape in seven days. It was brutal. That is a record for any shoot I've ever had anything to do with. Long runs at interviews were interspersed by relentless running from setup to setup doing b-roll material. Our client really got the bang for his buck squeezing so much into every day.

A young man prayed to receive Christ right in front of my rolling camera. That was quite an experience. It happened to me once before in 1989 in Manila. We interviewed an atheist and a recently converted atheist and a slew of kids with interesting testimonies. I shot some cool car to car footage out of the back of my convertible. We did some crazy stuff in restaurants, a grocery store, and all around a high school. We did basketball, volleyball, soccer, wrestling, and a bunch of general horsing around and lots of reality style bites of life following people around walking and talking, eating, waking up, doing chores, fixing a car engine.

It was very hard work, but a lot of good things are going to come out of it. It will be some time before editing is even started on this material but the plan is that it will find it's way into a number of different finished products eventually.

A really crazy thing happened as we were interviewing a high school principal in his office. He was interrupted by the police showing up needing to talk to him. We later found out that they were there to arrest a student who had been calling people at the school leaving death threats. They found that he had made a list of 125 people he wanted to kill. It's an absolutely insane time we live in. The need for outreach like this one on campuses has never been greater.

The young staff guy who is the point man for the ministry at that school is a man of very deep qualities. I admire him a lot. The very last night of the shoot we made a personal connection. He invited me to his church. There just might be a new close friend there.