feed my sheep

Hi Friends of upstairsproject.

I haven’t posted much on the upstairsproject for the last year or so.  I can point to some specific causes for my lack of inspiration for personal writing, and if you’re interested, I can share them. 

Most of you know that my day job is to be the media guy at First United Methodist Church in Cedar Falls, Iowa.  It’s a pretty cool job.  They pay me to play with cameras and computers and to share great stories of inspiration and hope. 

While I haven’t been writing much for this blog, I have been busy at work – especially through this pandemic shutdown – writing, shooting, editing.  The video included in this post is a sample of what I get to do every day, so I thought I’d share it here. 

Our pastors wanted a short video meditation on the 21st chapter of the Gospel of John to supplement their Sunday teaching.  We had big plans to reenact the whole scene, but on the day of the video shoot, the weather was cold and it was too windy to build a fire.  As with most of my video work, what started as an amazing, artistic, cinematic concept, ended up being a bunch of over-exposed, fuzzy-focused B-roll.  I’m too impatient to really be a good videographer, and on this day, our production standards were sacrificed to fit a tightening schedule and worsening weather. 

Pastor Matt wrote the script for himself and Pastor Scott, you’ll hear their voices.  He gave me some guidance for the narration, and I wrote that script and my voice is the first you’ll hear.   I chose the music and built the soundtrack and when I started laying the video onto the timeline, I realized how poor my footage was.  To save it, I had to make the low-quality look intentional, so I did a little color grading, added dust & scratches, and some light-leak effects.  In the end, I was surprised to be pleased with the project.

I hope to get back to writing for upstairsproject soon.  These are certainly interesting times that we’re living in, so there should be plenty for us to think and talk about. 

crc