This past Sunday afternoon four of the sr. high students and most of the youth leaders hung out after church to shoot a fundraiser video. The idea is that all the youth leaders are kidnapped and the congregation pools together to pay the ransom. (Of course, it could seriously backfire if they decide to celebrate the news instead. :P) While the youth staff is away at the National Youth Workers Convention in Nashville next month, one of the students will make the announcement during service that we’re raising money for CHIC 2006. The church secretary will then run into the sanctuary with the DVD and ransom note frantically saying, “Oh no! Oh no! Look what I found!” (This is so the church knows that the youth staff missing is a BAD thing ;) ). They’ll show the DVD of us being kidnapped and hopefully start raising the ransom money.

This is the first short-film I’ve done. I directed it, acted in it, and even filmed parts of it. It was a lot of fun to create. Ever since David and I did Dan’s wedding DVD I consciously notice camera angles and effects on TV and in movies. It’s fun to see how they put video together and figure out how I can achieve the same affects. Unfortunately we only had my camera to work with for this video, so we ended up shooting the same scene a several times from different angles. It certainly didn’t turn out perfect nor even how I expected it to turn out, but it’s not bad for an amateur youth group video. :) If nothing else, the award-winning acting is at least totally overwhelming. lol!

Check out the video of me being kidnapped on the youth group website:
http://www.redeemercrew.com/funstuff/videos/

(The page must be viewed in Internet Explorer for video streaming to work correctly.)

Posted on October 25, 2005