The WHM Blog

The following is a guest post from Kevin O’Brien about the inspiration behind Mighty, one of Journey Box Media’s newest mini-movies for Mother’s Day. As you prepare for your Mother’s Day worship service, let this mini-movie show you just how “mighty” moms really are. 

Many of the biggest holidays seem to be more magical and meaningful as a child: Christmas, Easter, Halloween, Columbus Day. As I grow older, its easy to become cynical of these dates as the conspiracy of card printers, electronic stores, and candy makers. What once was magical time becomes an onslaught of stress, bills, and unwanted family visits.

One holiday that has taken the opposite course for me is Mother’s Day.

As a child, Mother’s day was a day my teachers or my Dad had me make an otherwise terrible craft to give to my mom (luckily for me, Mom’s don’t care what these things look like). As I got older, Mother’s day became a last minute card purchase and quick note to my mom, usually a few days late, saying something about how great she has been.

Then came the day that my wife became a mother. That changed things. Mother’s day quickly became a celebration of the woman who gave birth to my son. That first year is one you really don’t want to mess up on, and I’m willing to bet 98% of men are unsure what to do. But we do our best.

The amazing thing about watching my wife become a mother is how great she is at it, and how much deeper that role gets with each passing year. It never gets easier. In fact, it gets more complicated, and more demanding, as time passes. I have seen my wife love more and hurt more as a Mother than she could as a daughter, girlfriend, fiancé, or a wife. There may not be any bond stronger than the bond between Mother and child.

One interesting bonus of watching my wife become stronger as a mother is that I now have a glimpse of all the junk I put my mom through, and how mighty she was to put up with and love me. I have realized that I owe her much more than I can repay.

So this year, may I endeavor to make the mothers in my life know how mighty they are, simply because they mother. There is nothing ordinary about that.

Mighty was based on a blog post written by Lisa-Jo Baker, who believes motherhood should come with its own super hero cape and blogs about it at lisajobaker.com. Her words have been incredibly inspiring to my wife and many other mothers I know. I challenge you to encourage the mothers in your community long after Mother’s Day by connecting them with Lisa-Jo at her blog. You could send an email with the link or print a handout with some info about it. The words found there will bring them strength when they need it the most (every day).

The following is a guest post from Kevin O’Brien about the creative process behind Light Shines, Journey Box Media’s newest mini-movie for Easter. I know you’re busy prepping for Easter, but this may be just the thing you need to get you through the next week and a half sprint…

This post is about the creative process (or blocks) in the development of Light Shines. You may want to watch it first:

I started thinking, reading and brainstorming about Easter back in the first week of January, which I was quite proud of. I was ahead of schedule, and had plenty of time to develop a story and create a mini-movie.

Then toward the end of February, I looked up and realized I was no longer ahead of schedule. In fact, I was behind… and I didn’t have a plan. This was not good.

As the Arts Director of my local church for almost a decade, this has been a common situation for me. Behind schedule, empty on ideas, stuck and frustrated. Maybe you can relate? Church production teams have the privilege and responsibility of sharing the greatest story in history. We also feel the pressure of creating something new every week. As Gary Molander points out in his amazing book Pursuing Christ, Creating Art, if we aren’t looking to Christ as our source of creativity, our creativity will run dry rather quickly.

Light Shines gave us a different process from most of our mini-movies. Usually, we develop the story, and I’ll be thinking of the visuals before or while the script is being written. For Light Shines, my partner wrote the script – which was super powerful – but I didn’t have a solid idea on what visuals to use to support the script.

So we sat down for a few meetings, and came up with some ideas – some outside of our ability (time and budget), and some that were just okay. We had a lot of “good” ideas, but nothing I was excited about. That was a problem. Time was running out, and after all, this is the story of Easter, the resurrection of our Savior. I couldn’t settle for “okay.”

I was so frustrated and stuck. So stuck that I even considered going the easy route with cliché Easter visuals (which I consider “safe,” and am adamant against). Thankfully, I wasn’t ready to give up.

A few months back I started reading Blain Hogan’s Untitled which talks about the creative process as hard work. He points out that there is no magic trick to getting “unstuck.” You just have to keep working, keep trying, keep searching.

So we did. We kept thinking, bringing ideas, killing ideas, borrowing ideas from our favorite 80’s movies (we almost completely ripped off The NeverEnding Story), till finally we had a break-through. We agreed on the visuals and the story and we were stoked, except that now we were ridiculously behind schedule.

So we scheduled, built, cast, shot, edited and released Light Shines in 8 days. It was an intense week of sweat, frustration, long nights, and lots of favors from friends. We were blessed with an amazing warehouse space to shoot in, and in the end we were thrilled with the result.

I will leave you with an encouraging tweet I read a few years back from Trey Hill (@squarerootof9). I try to remind myself of this weekly.

There are a lot of freaking talented people in this world… so I guess you’re going to have to rely on something else.

What are you relying on? You don’t have to do this alone.

Some photos from production:

The great warehouse space we were given to use (for free!)

The overhead shots were some of my favorite. (That’s me way up there)

We had some great friends and their kids shooting late into the night.

DIY equipment is the best.

A rented motorized slider gave us a sweet time-lapse shot.

The following is a guest post from Kevin O’Brien at Journey Box Media. He talks about his best-selling Easter Mini-Movie, Not the End, available here (and en español here).

One of the key factors in creating mini-movies is time. There are a lot of important elements that happen in any given worship gathering, so as producers of media content for churches we have a goal of keeping our projects under 3 minutes. To make them longer is risky.

But some stories can’t be properly told in 3 minutes or less. Some stories need us to linger in a moment, to allow a certain thought or emotion to take over us. Some stories need time to take us to the depths of sorrow to allow the joy of salvation to be so much sweeter.

We feel the story of Easter is such a story. So last year we decided to take a risk and create Not The End as a longer mini-movie (5:35). After all, why tell a story if it’s safe, right?

We wanted to take a journey through the three days of Easter weekend: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday – all through the perspective of Peter. To make it more challenging, I had this image stuck in my head of Peter running. I wanted most of the mini-movie to simply show the back of his head, with the reoccurring theme of “I wasn’t really looking.” We don’t reveal his eyes until Easter Sunday, when he opens his eyes for the first time, and turns toward the camera and runs to the tomb to find it empty. However, we don’t ever show the tomb or Jesus, simply Peter and his reaction. I think this decision allows us to focus on the emotion of the moment.

We designed the film to be used together as one piece, or broken up by the individual days and what they can represent:

FRIDAY: All hope seems lost. The disciples scattered. They were expecting Jesus to deliver them from Roman oppression. Worse, Peter denied his closest friend 3 times.

SATURDAY: God seems silent. We don’t hear much about Saturday. We used this day to represent when we feel God is not answering our prayers. How do you respond?

SUNDAY: The beginning. This is when Peter opens his eyes, when he runs to the tomb. His face shows joy, anticipation and fear as he runs.

Here are some examples of how you can use this piece:

As a 3 Week Series
Start a series 2 weeks before Easter, each Sunday focusing on a day.
    2 weeks before: Friday
    1 week before: Saturday (you could show Friday and Saturday, letting the moment build.
    Easter Sunday: Sunday – You could show Friday and Saturday before the message, then show
    Sunday after the message

All on Easter Sunday
Build the day around the concept, and divide the message up into 3 parts. Show Friday to intro the first part of the message, Saturday to transition to the second part, and Sunday to end the message with celebration into a time of worship.

Start on Good Friday
If your church is having a Good Friday service, you could show Friday or both Friday and Saturday during that service, then show them all on Easter Sunday for everyone to participate.

Because we know every church has unique needs, we’ve created a number of options for you:

With each version we are including several still images and Photoshop files from the mini-movie, giving you title or message backgrounds for each of the days.

Not The End (shorter version) uses the same story and imagery, but comes in right at 3 minutes.

Better yet, with the Director’s Cut, you get the full mini-movie, as well as each day as a separate file, all for the normal mini-movie price.

Better(er) yet, get the Not The End Collection, which includes the short version, Director’s Cut, all 3 days, and all the stills and Photoshop files.

However your church decides to share the story of hope this Easter, may you include some mystery and intrigue. His story deserves that.

The following is a guest post from Kevin O’Brien of Journey Box Media. Kevin dives into the creative process behind their latest mini-movie, Love Life, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

Love takes on a deeper meaning as we get older, at least it has for me. When I tell my wife, “I love you,” it has a much different meaning than the first time I told her in 9th grade.

And while I’m sure Paul didn’t write the famous 1 Corinthians 13 description of love with the romantic sense in mind, we wanted to take a stab at creating a mini-movie around what love could look like throughout the life of a marriage.

To borrow some words from a friend, “We often think of love as a passionate sprint, but it’s a long-slog marathon…”

Many ‘love stories’ are centered around a couple falling in love, and culminate with the wedding, as if that’s the end goal of love. But as most married couples would attest to, that is only the beginning of learning to love.

This is what we wanted to explore in “LOVE LIFE.”  Love takes work, it deepens with age, and it will get us through the greatest highs and the deepest lows of life.

We also wanted to show a bit more of real life than what might be your first impressions of these descriptions. Here are some examples:

Love does not envy
OBVIOUS: a lustful glance at another woman.
LOVE LIFE: a stay at home mom envying the adult conversations of her husband at work.

Love protects
OBVIOUS: a jacket over her shoulder on a cold day.
LOVE LIFE: a gentle touch of support upon news of the loss of a child.

Love is not self-seeking
OBVIOUS: gives the last bite of cake to the other
LOVE LIFE: allowing for rest when a night of intimacy was expected.

We hope you and your community will be able to connect with the story of “LOVE LIFE,” and be able to use it as a reminder and challenge to fight for our families and to never give up on your love life.

The following is a guest post from Scott Trapasso of Media that Matters. On November 11, as Americans celebrate Veterans Day, our neighbors in Canada will be celebrating Remembrance Day. Media that Matters has just released a brand new video called Thank You: Remembrance Day, and Scott tells us the story of how the video came about.

It’s always hard to put into words how video ideas come to be. This particular video was strange, as I knew that God was calling me to shoot a video to honor our veterans for some time, but I wasn’t sure exactly how to do that. The concept of shooting a veterans video came to me at some point during the summer, but it wasn’t until I recently visited with my Grandmother that something else sparked inside of me.

You see, this is where this story gets extremely personal. While visiting with my family a couple months ago my mother pulled out these envelopes. Inside were these war documents, medals, pictures, and letters. When she went on to explain that they had found them in the bottom drawer of an old armoire in the basement, I couldn’t believe it. I asked my Grandmother question after question as I wanted to learn more about our family history in the war. I was astounded to learn my Great Grandfather fought and lived through Vimy Ridge, perhaps one of the most profound battles of the First World War. I was also amazed to learn that my late Grandfather, who had just passed away 2 years ago, also served in the Navy. It was overwhelming to look at these pictures and listen to the stories about the things both my Great Grandfather and Grandfather had accomplished.

That’s when everything clicked.

I wanted to tell THAT story.

So a few phone calls were made, and we were off to the races. I decided that since this was going to be an extremely personal piece that I wanted as many elements of the film to be as real as possible. In order to do that, I travelled to my grandparents home town to film all of the outside shots. Our first location by the military armory, had amazing monuments and worked perfect with the rising sun. Our second location, was literally my grandparents basement, exactly the way they had left it, nothing set up or staged at all. I used all original artifacts that my grandmother had kept, and even had Dan (our main actor) sit at my grandfathers desk to write the letter in the video. The medal that we used in the video belonged to my Grandfather, and the box it came in was a gift to me after he passed away 2 years ago.

I wanted to share with you the behind the scenes story of this video for really only one reason, and that is to remind you, that your inspiration can come from anywhere, and sometimes from deep within yourself. The process of writing the script for this piece as well as asking all the appropriate questions to my family before filming was liberating for me, as I now have a greater understanding of what my family history entails. It provided me with a new opportunity to appreciate my grandparents in a different light, and learn a bit more about their lives story.

Lastly, I just want to say to all the veterans out there that I am extremely grateful for the sacrifice you have made and are continuing to make. My prayer is that we can all learn from those who have gone before us. And to both my Grandfathers, I just want to say that the letter I wrote as the script for this video was indeed from my heart. I meant every word, and I honestly want to say, Thank you.

Check out the video here. While the video was made for Remembrance Day, it could easily be used for Veterans Day, Memorial Day, or any other occasion when we honor those who served. 

The following is a guest post from Kevin O’Brien at Journey Box Media. He dives into the creative process behind the new election-themed mini-movie, Promises, Promises. 

Promises, Promises is a very special mini-movie for me. While it’s one that I did not write (that was my creative partner Phil Grimes), I did have the initial inspiration to create the piece. That inspiration came while returning home from the Echo Conference in July 2011, where I was compelled to live a better story, leave my job, and launch Journey Box Media. This post contains my (mostly) unedited thoughts jotted down on the return flight, which over a year later became the video Promises, Promises.

Unsatisfied with the way many Christians view politics and the amazing freedoms we have, I now had a voice to get my thoughts out there.

I hope this video can speak to everyone in our country, regardless of political affiliation. Most of the time when I write about our video projects, I ask you to watch the video first. This time however, if you haven’t seen Promises, Promises, yet, I’d ask you read through this first. Then watch the video.

I’d also like to ask for grace. This was almost a confession for me.

Friday, July 29, 2011

…………………

I hate election time.

I’m torn between my appreciation of freedom, and my following of Christ.

I was raised to believe that to be a Christian is to be a republican.

Somehow war and violence was okay if it was to keep our country safe, to protect our values, our way of life.

How much money, time, energy, emotion, passion is spent during election seasons?!

I am not anti-government.

My Father was in the military, and I am completely aware that our freedoms are not free.

I am extremely thankful for the sacrifice of those who serve our nation as well as their families.

I cannot reconcile [with the idea that] the way to peace is war. 

[The feel of the video should be] very motivational, challenging

A Christian government/president is not the answer… That’s what Israel was looking for, but Christ was much different.

Wouldn’t it be cool if the answer to poverty didn’t rest in the government? 

Wouldn’t it be cool for a few to change the world? 

For the homeless to find a home?

For the hungry to be filled?

For the addicted to be set free?

Wouldn’t it be cool if we were known by our love?

Yea, that would be cool.

The Church is the answer

Be the answer. Change the world.

…………………

Okay, I’ll admit – the “wouldn’t it be cool” part was stolen inspired straight from a Nissan commercial… at least we didn’t use it.

I’ll also admit that the last line was super corny, but what do you want from my raw notes after a few days of my world getting rocked by Gary Molander, Carlos Whitaker, Jon Acuff, Andy Crouch, and the Skit Guys?

We all at Journey Box Media hope you are inspired by Promises, Promises to live a better story.

The following is a guest blog from Kevin O’Brien from Journey Box Media. Kevin shares some of his thoughts about their latest project, Shoppers.

First of all, this post is a look at what inspired the mini-movie Shoppers. It’s not intended to be a “what’s wrong with the world” rambling, rather a lighthearted commentary. Before you read further, it’s important that you watch the mini-movie Shoppers.

This is certainly not the first mini-movie about consumerism in the Church, but hopefully it will cause people to smile and think at the same time. Shoppers is the result of an observation I made a few months back when I was shopping for a car: churches and car dealerships have a lot in common. Remember, this is just for fun.

1. Both churches and car dealerships claim they do things differently.
“We’re not like the guys down the street: we won’t hassle you. We won’t take advantage of you. You can trust us.” Sound familiar?

2. It’s not about the money, it’s about the relationship. 
Both churches and dealerships are constantly fighting the public opinion (whether deserved or not) that they only exist to get as much money as possible from each person who walks through the doors.

3. Most websites look the same.
It seems like a few years back someone decided what car dealership websites should look like, because about 95% of them all look the same. It’s a very similar situation with church websites. There seems to be about four templates out there, and most churches are using one of them.

4. Both churches and dealerships are trying to convince people they are in need of something they don’t currently have.
While you may need a car, dealerships seem to have a habit of trying to convince you that you need to spend as much money as possible (and then some) to get the most expensive car you can (or can’t) afford. Their job is to convince you that your life will be unfulfilled if you don’t get the nicest car. This one may seem harsh, but if you think about it, that’s what churches do, right? Churches help people realize that their lives are unfulfilled without God, while a lot of people think they can go through life on their own.

Remember, for fun.

While the mission of the church is far more eternal than that of a car dealership, it was an interesting observation and hopefully one that can challenge us in our decisions about what we do and why we do it.

The following is a guest blog from Kevin O’Brien from Journey Box Media. Through the background story of the best-selling mini movie, Free, Kevin provides incredible insight into the creative process.

In any sort of video production (or any production), one of the most challenging and important stages is the story development.  It is easy to simply get excited about an idea, then run out and shoot it.

But I’ve found that some of our best projects are the result of the slow development of a story, rather than a flash of inspiration.

Free, one of our latest projects, is a great example of this. There were hours of pre-production, video shooting, and post-production editing and effects. However, none of this would have mattered if we didn’t have a strong story.

Our challenge was to tell the story of people who needed to be reminded that Christ has already set them free.

Free’s story changed several times from our initial brainstorming meeting. In fact, if you had just been in that first meeting, and not involved until you saw the final product, you might not even recognize it.

If you haven’t seen Free, you might want to take a look before continuing.

Out of our initial meeting this film had: a pair of boys rather than the girl, there was a huge wall of photos, an overnight candle lit vigil, a huge crowd at sunrise on the beach, and no Polaroid camera.

But rather than rushing out and shooting our initial flash of inspiration, we were patient and did not settle for the story we had. We spent a few weeks building upon, breaking apart and rethinking our initial inspiration, and as a result ended up with a powerful story that has engaged the emotions and spirit of thousands of viewers.

Here are a few things we have learned about story development over the years. These are certainly not original with us, but our hope is that whatever story you tell, and however you tell it (video, worship service, writing) you can incorporate one or two of these concepts:

1. Team Effort

Whenever possible, include a couple of trusted thinkers in your development discussions. Don’t try to do it alone. Even if it’s only one other person, that extra perspective may be the difference you need in your story. While the Polaroid camera in Free was my idea, it came after someone else suggested the characters holding the mug shots to start with. One thing to point out here is that this team does not have to be a part of your production team. Out of the 3 or 4 people on our brainstorming team, only 2 actually produced the film.

2. Keep Talking

My favorite shot in Free is the final shot, where the girl breaks the fourth wall and takes a picture of the audience. That final moment, I believe, is where the story ultimately connects with everyone watching, and makes it personal. However, this shot was one of the last ideas we had, and it did not come from our development meetings. It was the idea of my good friend, Alan Reynolds, and it was after we had already been talking about this project for weeks. If we had not continued the conversation outside of our brainstorming meetings, that shot would not have happened.

3. Don’t Settle 

There was a point in our story development when we were close to being finished, but one part of the story didn’t really make sense. It would have been easy (and it almost happened) to just move into production and hope the audience could make the jump or not notice the inconsistencies. Thankfully, there was always at least one of us who refused to settle and challenged us to continue pushing until we had a complete story.

4. Refuse Safe Stories 

You may have heard this before as “think outside the box,” but we refer to it as a refusal to tell safe stories. God’s story deserves more than that. Make your stories intriguing. You can do this in story development, casting, choosing your shots, editing, and music choice. One of our passions is to engage real emotions in our audience, and that requires the audience to buy into the story. Great stories involve great risks, and while it’s difficult to do this in a video under 5 minutes, it can be done. Why tell a story if it’s safe?