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Showing posts from 2014

VFX and communicating the gospel

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Using media to help preach the gospel of Jesus Christ is nothing new for the JESUS Film Project. But the use of Damah film festival and later the Global Short Film Network.  We have used dialog lines from the JESUS films for such things as My Last Day (a 9-minute Japanese anime film about the crucifixion of Christ) and more recently File Zero - a 14-part 'web episode' series due to be released in 2015. From our letter this month I hope you picked up that we are finding that short films are a great way to start conversations.  We've had reports from around the world from people telling us of how easy it is to start a conversation when you have a short film that you want to share with a friend.  If you know about YouTube - you know this has become a global phenomenon.  In our case, we seek to make films that start conversations that can lead to Christ!  We acquire what we can from other sources, but we also end up making some of the films here in Orlando and with our part

My Last Day gospel presentation out of 'R&D'

Research and development is a funny thing.  Sometimes you get a group of people together and they have a great idea but the timing is not right.  That is my perspective on this meeting that we had two years ago.  The meeting was for the purpose of following up on the 'My Last Day' anime film that we had completed the previous year with Brethern Entertainment and Studio 4C in Tokyo.  This 9-minute film on the crucifixion of Jesus had been a test, a 'pilot film' for the idea of combining JESUS film dialog with new visuals and new story telling (in Japanese anime) to tell the story. The group had been excited about My Last Day and felt more of the life of Jesus needed to be done in this form.  Their key conclusion though, was that the next step was that it needed to be combined  with a gospel presentation on a mobile device that would be simple enough that anyone could use.  The immediate idea was to develop an app - but as it turned out the timing was not right. I di

CG and Apologetics

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As Cru staff here in the U.S. we have a core of about 12 graduate level classes we need to take toward a certificate.  I was recently able to take a class on Apologetics online.  Christian Apologetics is of course the study of the defense of the Christian faith.  For my final project I could have written an article or prepared a speech on one of the essential topics. But of course, being immersed more and more in CG (computer graphics imaging) as was interested in the 3rd option - a Powerpoint project.  I increasingly use more CG tools in the Film Production department of the Jesus Film Project (doing some visual effects and also helping 'pre-visualize' new projects we are researching or about to produce).  The course instructions were that  this would Powerpoint would be the type of thing you could go through with a student who might be a new Christian.  The tool should help then gain some grounding in the Christian faith and how to defend their beliefs. I had the idea o