You See What We Saw

I said I would get this up this weekend, so here it is. This is the video that I made to share with our church about our trip to Faith Alive. It's basically a summary of everything that we did in Jos. A rather short summary considering we were there for 10 days. At any rate, I am excited to have this done and was very glad to share it with my trip mates. I've kind of taken for granted the fact that I've been able to relive (or at least revisit) the places and faces of Faith Alive, so it was nice to see my other travelers reactions to the video that I've seen dozens of times while editing. I hope you enjoy it.

Post-Lenten Journey

Happy Easter! I once heard a pastor say that we are 'Easter people' because we don't end the story of Jesus with his crucifixion. So, I don't think I am late in saying Happy Easter, since really we should be celebrating it year round.

It's been a while and I've been REALLY busy with the FPC video. As a matter of fact, I'm still at my office right now (6:45pm) working on it. Actually, I'm just leveraging the power of my work machine to do the work for me. It took my laptop over 2 hours to push out the video last night...this beast of a computer is on track to get it done in about 40 minutes. But the real news is that it's almost done! I know that any of you still reading this are anxious to see more videos, but I want to show it to my fellow group members first. It'll be like a premiere they see it, and this will be the theatrical release. I'm going to see them on Friday night, so I'll probably be posting this on Saturday.

In other news, our group was in the local paper today. Click here to check it out. It's pretty cool that our church is getting some recognition for their efforts, and hopefully it'll help spread the word in the community.

Well, that's all I have to say for now. I still have 25 minutes of computer rendering to wait for before I can leave, so I'll put some pictures in here. From left to right: a message written on the outdoor check-in at Faith Alive, a teacher at Elim School, and the room I shared with Bob. My bed was on the right and yes, we did put the mosquito nets down. This just happened to be the last day there.

God be with you!

Gaining momentum

In this picture, Innocent, me and Christy. If memory serves me correctly, Innocent is Dr. Mercy's driver, and just a generally helpful guy to have around. He also gets into Nigerian soccer the way I get into Georgia Football. Christy was one of our cooks, and my takwara. I have no idea if I'm close to spelling that right, but it means "name-sake" in Hausa. She tried to teach me a lot of Hausa, but I wasn't a very good student.

I think I have just finished the preliminary version of the script, formatted correctly and everything. It's amazing how excited I get when I can actually devote time to this project. I can't wait to get into the real editing of it. Now that I've got my road map, I should be able to have a very rough cut by the end of the week! This is all pending approval from Russ and any other Faith Alive board members of my script, but I'm not anticipating any major overhauls. I was pretty conservative in my approach and went basically with a straightforward sales pitch about the clinic and what it offers. I'll get fancy with some of the intro graphics, but this is meant to be about the clinic and getting people interested in helping in some form or fashion. So I didn't delve too deep into the HIV epidemic as a whole, and chances are that you aren't going to cry when you watch it. But I haven't picked out my interview pieces yet, so there is a chance that they'll add that emotional element. They will without a doubt, I guess the question is about how much I want to introduce. Only time will tell, and you'll just have to keep checking back here until I get the video done and posted online. In the meantime, someone sent me this link the other day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWybv7vTJ38

It actually came from Erika, who was on the trip. I think a lot of us are struggling with the excessiveness of our lives, even in the places we don't see as being excessive. But when you know how far a dollar can go in other parts of the world, it's kind of hard not to question every purchasing decision you make. So, this video kind of portrays that on a larger scale than I deal with, but the message is the same. And whether you like it or hate it, I think it's a neat concept.

Happy St. Patrick's Day to you all! May God be with you! Thanks for reading!

Scriptwriting

My task for today has been trying to write a script for the Faith Alive video. Ideally, I would have done this prior to ever setting foot on a plane. But I didn't. So now I'm trying to retrofit my footage to a script...not the easiest thing in the world to do. However, it has gone remarkably well. I just opened my little word pad thing and started typing, and 2 hours later I have a first version of the script. And as I was writing, I would have little flashes of where certain interviews might fit in. It's really pretty cool, cause this will allow me to move much faster on the basic structure of the video. If you think of it as a body, the script is the skeleton, it's the foundation from which everything else comes. (That's why I should've had this done long ago!) Then the images, are the muscles and organs. They're the part that really does all the work for the video. And then the graphics are the skin. Well, it would actually be better to say that they're the clothing, but what need skin somewhere. At any rate, the graphics are the part that make the video look finished. And so with that metaphor, I become Dr. Frankenstein, trying to piece together these parts to make a functioning beast in the end. And with any luck, I'll pull it off. I need to polish up my script and get it formatted so that I can send it off to Russ for the go-ahead. I think it's a good start, and I can actually envision what it'll look like. That's usually the toughest part, and I'm starting to breakthrough it.

That's it for now! Thanks for stopping by and may God be with you! And I have to say this...How 'bout them Dawgs!

A new kind of balancing act

Before I went on my trip, I wrote about my concerns of finding a good balance between videoing and participating while in Jos. As it turned out, that wasn't an issue and if there was ever a question of which to choose, I chose to be there in the moment without the camera. A good example of this was a conversation I had outside the clinic on the wall with a woman waiting for her sister. I had a nice talk with her and let her son play with my still camera while we talked. (see pictures). And when her sister came out of the clinic I didn't grab the camera and ask to shoot them, although I knew I'd built up enough trust with them to get their permission. Instead, I talked with her for a little while and even prayed with them before heading off to lunch...which I was about 30 minutes late for. Anyways, it was a really nice interaction that I couldn't spoil with technology. It was just a genuine conversation that will be preserved in my memory and nowhere else.


So why am I bringing the balance issue up now? Cause it's an even greater concern now. Here's what I'm juggling: a job, editing 2 videos in the next 3 weeks for Faith Alive and First Pres, and trying to live a healthy life that doesn't involve staring at a computer for 14 hours a day. To complicate things, I am often really annoyed to be at work editing videos that essentially tell people how to make lots of money so that they can be happy. The real theme is follow your passion, and that'll bring you success, and that'll lead to happiness. But when a book by the title of Do What You Love and The Money Will Follow is cited as a source of inspiration, I think we all can figure out that the idea is money is what makes you happy in some form or fashion. Now I don't mean to rail on my employer and I am very grateful for the work, it's just hard to work on those videos for eight hours while I know that I have the content at home to be making a video that really can make a difference in someone's life. I really enjoyed working on that piece for the church last week because it was for something that I believed in. That's doing what I love, and it's not with the premise of leading to financial gain. Would I love to get paid to make these kinds of videos? Heck yes. Would I love to do these kinds of videos even if the pay was only enough to scratch by with? Absolutely, because I would be producing something with a purpose. Look, I don't mean to get all preachy and this is getting way off topic, but it's playing a big role in my stress as of late. The fact of the matter is simple: I want to work on my videos for FA, but by the time I get home and cook (though Anna has been great at giving me time off from that) and eat, I have at the most 2 hours of good brain power left. And that's all assuming that there are no other evening commitments. So where is the balance to be found? I've already planned to work on the weekends for the next few weeks, but I still need more time. I still am confident that I can get these projects done, but the quality of them is my main concern. I want to ensure that what I hand off to the FA board is something they'll actually want to use, and something I'm proud to say I made.

So now that I've typed for 15 minutes, I hope I can shift into editing mode. But I really needed to vent some of that...Anna has probably heard enough. So thanks for reading if anyone still does. I'm still going to write, so check back every so often.

Let there be video!

As promised...



This video is going to be shown in church and used in other places to promote the church's projects after Easter. The campaign is called "The Heart of the Father in Africa" or HOTFIA if you like acronyms. Anyways, I spent most of this morning and afternoon making this and I'm really pleased with how it turned out. Perhaps the greatest part is the music. It was recorded at the morning devotional at Faith Alive. As I was editing this piece, I had in my mind that I would use some other music that I recorded while there, but I accidentally deleted those files while trying to make room on the hard drive. So after I'd laid out the voice over and put in the visuals, I dropped the music in and the way it plays is exactly how it fit without any editing. The "praise the Lord" at the end starts at exactly the right time. It was pretty stunning when I played it the first time. It's like it was made for this. I hope you enjoy it!

The Waning Blog

So it would appear that I'm not going to be able to sustain this blog for long. Obviously, since I can't post more than twice a week. But I may have some incentive for you to come back...VIDEO! Yes, that's right. I should have a video ready to put up here on Sunday. It's for the church's post-lent project. And I got a rough cut done of the church version of the Faith Alive video last night, but it'll still be a while til it's ready for showing. So check back on Sunday afternoon and I hope to have something. Thanks for stopping by! I apologize for my lack of sharing!

Quick Update

I haven't given up on writing, so keep checking every couple of days. I've just gotten busy again with work and life and blogging has fallen lower on the priority list. I will be posting more pictures on here, too if that interests you more than my ramblings. If you're really interested in pictures, and I mean REALLY interested (cause there are over 500), you can go to:

http://faithalivefpc.shutterfly.com/?a=1&emid=sharshar&linkid=link4

Hopefully that'll work! Also, I should start working on videos in earnest this week. I just have one more tape to log and capture. I should have finished that this weekend, but Anna took me on a 50 mile bike ride that depleted my desire for anything except the couch on Saturday...and I did our taxes. Woohoo.

Check back soon!