DP Meeting

One of the things that I love about movie making is the collaborative effort.  I enjoy bringing together people skilled in their own areas, whether it be costume, make-up, lighting and so on, and using those collective talents to do something wonderful.

Unfortunately, due to a variety of reasons, most of the Sonlight Pictures projects thus far have had minimal crew.  That’s why I was so excited to sit and meet with Curtis Graham, an AFI trained, award-winning cinematographer who runs his own studio locally.  I saw his work at a local screening of the Christian short film called Gettin’ Out, produced by the pastor of the Countryside Christian Center.  My daughter and I attended the premiere and were impressed by Graham’s work.

I dropped an email to Curtis and asked if we could meet for lunch.  He’s a very nice man and we had a good chat over burgers and salad.  I had been praying for the Lord to provide a talented Director of Photography.  Neither Curtis nor I know if it is in the Lord’s plan to work together, but we did agree a lot on approach, so who knows.

Curtis will be working on his own film project this year and we offered our assistance when shooting begins.  So, we’ll see what happens, but it is inspiring and hopeful to meet fellow talented Christian filmmakers in the area.  The more the merrier!

Our Stubborn Hearts

“So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts, to follow their own counsels.” Psalm 81:12

For a long time we, as a country, have been pushing God out of our public lives. We try and remove him from the schools, from the holiday seasons, from the displays, from sporting events and from political office.

We have become very stubborn. We have become very arrogant. We have become very selfish and vain. We have put ourselves above God.

Our Lord, our God is very gracious. If we want him out, he’ll leave and let us follow our own counsels.

That sure seems like a bad idea. Counsel without God has no moral compass. The determination of right and wrong become rudderless, pointing us in the direction of the latest whims of society and of ourselves. Everything becomes relative. Everything becomes about our own personal interpretation.

There is a word for when everyone lives by their own rules. Anarchy.

We are living in a country floundering in spiritual anarchy.

Look at what has happened when we removed God and his absolute truths as our spiritual compass. Without God, nothing is sacred, nothing can be in “the state of being holy.” How can one be holy when we no longer recognize holiness? When nothing is sacred, everything is up for interpretation. Like the value of life. The unborn, the elderly, the infirmed, the imprisoned, the malformed, the burdensome… the lives of these people are separated from the collective good of society. They are purged through abortion or euthanasia or persecution.

The scars of spiritual anarchy.

One of the greatest crimes we’ve perpetrated on ourselves as a country is allowing Christianity to move from a belief system and into a culture, a way of life.

A belief system based on God’s eternal truths is immovable, not up for debate or political correctness.

However, when Christianity became more of our culture and less a true belief system, things started to change. Cultures always evolve. They are fluid. They adapt depending on those in power, on those with money, on those with influence. The truths of a culture ebb and flow with the societal times. They are not fastened to anything solid or eternal, but on momentary blips on the cultural radar.

We must reclaim our faith, our Christianity as a belief system, with rules handed down by our Creator. Rules that require sacrifice and challenge us. Truths that offer us inspiration and demand self-control. With paths to salvation that are hard to travel and difficult to face. With an end game that offers us eternal happiness, overflowing love and the bliss of spending the rest of time within the presence of our God and Father.

We must re-prioritize our lives and make our Lord and Savior our primary focus. We must reintroduce God into our childrens lives, including him in our education, on our policies, in our buying habits and in our critical life decisions.

Left to our own stubborn hearts and our own counsel, we are surely damned to a life without God. We must ask God for his never-ending compassion, patience and grace and implore him to offer us his counsel, guiding us with eternal truths that lead us to the only path to his son, Jesus Christ.

Flawed Shepherds

If Jesus were standing on the other side of the room and there were 100 people standing between you and him, would you let anyone of those people stop you from running toward him and embracing him?

I would guess your answer to that question would be No.

In this weeks readings, in the book of Hebrews, which sets into place the understanding of Jesus as high priest, the author states:

“Every high priest is taken from among men and made their representative before God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. He is able to deal patiently with the ignorant and erring, for he himself is beset by weakness…”

For many, including myself, have found a priest, a clergy member or a pastor as a flawed, sometimes ignorant, often erring human beset by weakness standing between us and Jesus.  Over my life I realized it is up to me to not allow them to get in my way of my faith and I have been able to separate the people who make up the church with that faith in Jesus Christ.

As a Catholic, there have been numerous occasions in my life where actions of priests could have interfered with my faith.  The priest who confirmed me left the priesthood and got married.  Another priest who was involved heavily with our youth group ended up being an alcoholic and went into rehab.  The priest that married my wife and I is no longer a priest.

And, of course, those horrid events of child abuse that littered our faith but, fortunately, never entered my life personally.

However, my faith is in Jesus Christ, not Father (enter name here).

As a Catholic, I rely on their role as priest to receive the sacraments.  And, as a Catholic, the most holy is that of the Eucharist, where we believe that Jesus is actually present, body and blood, at every Mass.  As fulfillment from God in Passover to Jesus on the Cross and then the Holy Spirit during Mass, that living sacrifice, to me, is Jesus literally standing on the other side of the room and no one is going to get in my way of running to embrace him in that sacrament.

Non-Catholic Christians, I’m sure, have dealt with the same struggles of pastors gone astray, of church leaders being less than Christian.  One only need to look at the headlines over the past 20 years to see pastors having succumb to lust or greed or adultery.  There failures, though disappointing, are not entirely unexpected.  It is the nature of human imperfection trying to encapsulate the purity of Jesus Christ.  As you and I struggle and often fail in our attempts to be holy, so will our church leaders for they face the same sins that we do.

Fortunately, Jesus Christ is not bound by human imperfection.  The Holy Spirit is able to work through us despite our own flaws.  As many times I’ve had priests fail me, I’ve also had priests inspire me, like Father John LaTondress who used humor to reach me in high school, Father John Oliver who guided me through college, Father Michael Morris, whose homilies were truly inspired by the flame of the Holy Spirit, and Father Robert Cadrecha who exuded love and humor and tenderness.

No matter your denomination, remember that our church leaders are “beset by weakness” and will make mistakes.  Because of their role as shepherds in our spiritual lives they need our prayers, our forgiveness, our support and our understanding.  As shepherds they will be targets of Satan in an attempt to scatter the flock.  Don’t let Satan win that battle.  If your shepherd falls, lift him up with prayer.

And, whatever you do, don’t let anything or anyone get between you and salvation in Jesus Christ.

Funny Is Good, Even When You Don’t Need It

A few years ago I was watching the behind-the-scenes footage from the show Firefly.  Joss Whedon, who created the show (along with Buffy – The Vampire Slayer, Angel and Dollhouse), offered some casting advice of which I have found to be ingenious and completely true.

As a rule, Whedon only casts people who are adept at comedy, even if the show is a drama.  Why?  Because if you can master comic timing, you can master dramatic timing.  Beyond that, no drama is all drama, most have comedic moments.  In situations like that, if you can’t pull off the comedy, then the drama falls flat as well.

A perfect example of this difference is between NCIS and NICS: Los Angeles.  NCIS is exceptionally well written, has full characters portrayed by actors all of whom are very adept at comedy.  Their talent raises the level of both the humor and the serious moments of the show.

NCIS: Los Angeles is painfully un-funny.  Don’t get me wrong, they try to be funny on occasion, but the actors have no comedic timing what-so-ever!  They don’t have comedic rhythm, they don’t know when some lines are throw away lines and when others are zingers.  In a cop drama that tries to inject various comedic moments, when the actors can’t pull off funny, their dramatic acting comes off as one-note performances, leaving the entire experience void of quality entertainment.

Going forward, when auditioning I’m going to always include a scene that has humor in it, even if the actual shooting script does not.  Timing, comedic or dramatic, is a natural gift, not something that can be faked or learned.  If you can find an actor with that natural gift you have a great chance of increasing the success of your project.

Tips for Christian Filmmakers – Nothing Wasted

As we continue down or “lessons learned” list we created by watching a large number of Christian films, lets move onto the idea that nothing in a film should be wasted.

There Are No Small Characters (Or Actors)

One of the best written shows on television is the show NCIS, starring Mark Harmon.  The show works on a lot of levels, primarily because the investigative team has formed a family dynamic and you enjoy watching the people solve the crimes.  As my daughter once said “I don’t watch the show to figure out the mystery, I watch the show to watch the characters figure out the mystery.”

In other words, the show has a high “hang out” factor… you wouldn’t mind hanging out with the characters because you enjoy their company.

While watching a behind-the-scenes interview with Mark Harmon about the show, he correctly noted that it’s the minor characters, the one-scene actors that actually make the show tick.  These are the characters brought in that are specific for the mystery of the week.  If they are not on, if they are not believable in their one scene, then the entire story, the entire journey falls apart.

The same holds true with Christian films.  Not only are the smaller characters important, but the actors playing them are even more critical to the success of the film.

Speaking from numerous low to no budget film experiences, I know that finding enough talented actors to work on a project as a volunteer or for virtually no money can be a very difficult challenge.

Circumstances or approach have often required Christian filmmakers to fill those smaller roles with lesser actors or non-actors.  If this can be avoided, it should.

Remember, the life of a film is very short.  If its a feature its only 75-120 minutes.  That’s it.  If it’s a short film, even less.  Nothing can be wasted.  No plot line, no device, no moment, no performance.

It is quite common in Christian films that a character with only one line will be performed poorly by a non-actor and immediately jolt the audience out of the world of the film.  It may take the audience another five minutes to re-engage with the film.  That’s five minutes wasted.

This is especially important at the beginning of the film.  Audiences generally decide whether they like a film within the first 10 minutes.  Don’t undermine that opportunity by placing non-actors in early moments of the story.

We were watching a short Christian film the other day about a lawyer working in an office.  As the film opens the lawyer, portrayed effectively by the actor, was walking through the office, giving the audience an understanding of his job function and his workload.  As he nears his office a one-line character came up to ask about a project the lawyer was working on.  The performance was poor and the line didn’t ring true.  Having watched many Christian films using non-actors, my defense mechanism immediately clicked on and I thought “Oh no… this isn’t going to be a good film.”

The short film ended up being quite good and the main actor was very solid.  But one good main actor who’s in 99% of the film can easily be undermined by a one-line actor in .05% of the film.

No role is too small, no actor unimportant.  The film’s success is based on the sum of all of its parts.

If You Show the Gun, Use It

In a previous post about screenwriting we talked about a quote from Anton Chekov, a Russian playwright, who said “Don’t show a gun in Act 1 if you’re not going to use it in Act 3.”

There are no wasted pages or characters in a screenplay.

We recently watched a Christian film where a main character was being forced to make a decision that was against his will.  The decision time frame was well defined (your decision has to be made by this date at this time) as were the consequences (something bad would happen if you don’t comply).

The character questioned whether or not they could abolish their morals and make the decision being forced upon him, no matter the consequence.

As the film unfolded, we were never once brought back to that final moment of decision.  It was a wasted opportunity.  If the story would have intercut the action of the story with the main character at this meeting, as the clock ticked down, having to decide whether or not to follow their faith, that would have added tremendously to the urgency of the story and the depth of the script.

But we never heard about that critical moment of decision again, even though it was the catalyst for the entire film.

Nothing should be wasted.   If you show it in Act 1, it has to be used in Act 3.  If it isn’t needed in Act 3, then it’s not needed in Act 1 either.

So, those are just some tips, some suggestions from your fellow, humble, flawed film makers trying to use their talents to praise Jesus Christ.  Let us all do our best, using our best, expecting our best and make films that will touch souls and change lives.

Tips for Christian Filmmakers – Good, Evil, Precious and Crying

Having watched over 50 Christian films in the last few years, we’ve been jotting down some lessons learned on things done well and things to which Christian filmmakers could improve.  We continue our tips series with a few more friendly suggestions.

Make Bad Bad

In order for a battle of good vs. evil to occur, there must be clearly defined heroes and villains.  Many Christian films, however, often fall prey to what I call The Next Generation Effect.

Do you remember the original Star Trek series?  There were good people and bad people.  The good people often had flaws and the bad people often has virtues.

Then, Star Trek: The Next Generation came out and fell victim to political correctness.  The characters in this series had no individual voice and every villain had a reason for their crimes, thereby not really making them evil at all, but victims.

Let’s look at the main characters… the good guys.  You had a Klingon that wanted to integrate with humans, you had a boy with the intelligence of a man, you had an android that longed to be human, you had a blind engineer that could see better than everyone else, you had a captain that talked more than acted, you had a first officer who did little more than remind the captain not to do things and a telepath that could tell you things people were thinking without them talking.

It was BORING!  Everyone was basically the same.

Now, how different would it have been if you had a true Klingon who thought humans were inferior and a fiery captian with an itchy trigger finger and a nosy, insecure first officer, and a telepath that used that ability for upward advancement and a truly blind engineer and boy running around who may be the illegitmate child of the captain and a cold andriod that was smarter than the crew combined all trying to work together on the ship.  Throw into the mix some real bad guys who simply like to be bad, who find evil more rewarding than good, and then you’ve got a good show!

Christian filmmakers often don’t want to make really bad people, or really flawed people, or Christians who don’t act Christian and are hypocrits and insincere.  But, isn’t that life?  Don’t we all know Christians that are hypocritcial and insincere and flawed and liars?  It doesn’t mean they’re not trying to be Christian, they’re just failing miserably.  And that’s okay!  Not only is it okay, it’s interesting!

Thankfully, Jesus is a patient savior.  He’ll wait for us to figure out our faith journey until our last breath.

Many Christian films are filled with great people with wonderful kids finding that one flawed person in the story and leading them to church where everything is fixed in a single prayer meeting.  In life wouldn’t that be wonderful and great and awesome?  On film, it’s not very interesting.

Make your villains villains.  Some people reject God.  Some people reject salvation.  Some people choose evil over good or money over God or self over selflessness.  Some may even have very good reasons, such as abuse by clergy or the death of a loved one, but simply chose the world’s solution instead of divine assistance during those struggling times.  Don’t make the villains caricatures, but make them bad.

A heroes journey is directly tied to the threat posed by the villain.  A weak villain = a weak hero.  And remember, sometimes, the most powerful thing you can do is have someone who is evil unwittingly be the catalyst for good.

Not Everything is Precious

Out of all of the words we speak in a day, only about 10% of them are really worth remembering tomorrow.  Granted, in a film, the ratio should be much higher than that, but not 80% or 90% and definitely not 100%.  However, I have watched a lot of Christian films where each line is spoken as if it were handed down by God himself.  Each line hovering, waiting for a moment of absorption of its own greatness.  People don’t speak that way.  Even preachers don’t speak that way.  Some preachers like fart jokes.  Some Christians giggle at funerals.  It happens.

A script, a story, a film should have beats… sections… with a rhythm and a build up and a crescendo that leads to the next beat with another build up and crescendo.  If every line is precious, none of them are.  If every day was 75 degrees and no humidity, we’d never appreciate them.  Make the lines that are truly important stand out by elevating them above the rest.

Stop Crying

And finally, don’t cry.  I’m not saying people in life don’t cry.  I’m saying it’s always more interesting when a character in a film tries not to cry than to actually cry.  It is vastly more powerful.  My daughter and I watched a rapture-themed film the other day and four of the five main characters all burst into full blown tears within the first 30 minutes of the film.

Don’t do it!  Why?

Because watching someone cry is a passive emotional experience for the audience.  But, if I see someone trying not to cry, I imagine within myself the struggle they are going through.  Heck, I may cry before they do!

It’s the same with violence.  Showing me a violent act makes it a passive event.  However, if I hear a violent act and I have to imagine what is happening, I am generating that emotion and I am actively involved.

So, if you character is supposed to cry, change it to the character trying not to cry.  It is always, always, always more interesting.

Next time… Nothing Wasted.

What If Good Isn’t Good Enough?

“I’m a good person.”

You hear that a lot.  From people who attend church every week.  From people who sometimes go to church or who were raised in a family that attended church, but no longer attend.  Or people who believe in God or some nebulas spiritual force, but don’t believe in organized religion.  From people that have moved going to church and being an active believer in Jesus Christ toward the bottom of their priority list.

“I’m a good person.  I haven’t killed anyone.  I’m a good parent.  I help out when I can.”

Many people are right.  They are good people.  But is being “good” good enough to get into heaven?

After further contemplating last weeks Gospel, about the rich young man, I would say the answer is a big fat No.  Think of what Jesus said… following the commandments is not enough.

The rich man followed the commandments.  He was a good person.  In the rich man’s world, he was not only faithful, but blessed.  However, salvation was allusive for him because Jesus Christ was not the first thing in his life.  It was not his number one priority.  He would not leave everything he had to follow the Messiah.

Are we?  Are we willing to leave everything behind to follow Jesus?  Everything?

We are not called by Jesus to be a good person, we are called by him to be a holy person.  We are called to sacrifice, to be rejected by this world, to be ridiculed, if necessary.  Is that why Jesus stated that the road to heaven is so narrow?  Because so few people will choose a holy life, a difficult life, a life in opposition to the world’s priorities?

It makes me wonder how much more I have to do to be considered holy.  The short answer is a lot.  I have to do a lot more to even come close to holiness.  Do I have the strength?  Do I have the will?  Do I have the faith to live such a life?  How does one live a holy life in today’s world?

Catholics revere saints similarly to the way football fans revere players in the Hall of Fame.  Saints have lived a holy life.  They didn’t set out to become saints.  They merely converted their faith into a way of life, into action, into selflessness in such a way that it changed everything around them.

They give us examples of how to act, how to sacrifice, how to pray, how to be diligent, how to serve.  They also show us that becoming more holy will undoubtedly lead to more struggle.  Even saints have been rejected by their own spiritual leaders or religious orders because they were too holy, lived too pure of a life, a life the others around them were unwilling or unable to live.

Am I living a life so holy that it even makes my religious leaders uncomfortable?  Am I even willing to live a holy life that makes me uncomfortable?  I have such a long way to go.  I must pray and grow in my faith and act accordingly.

I know for a fact that I am a good person.

And I know for a fact that it is not good enough.

Tips for Christian Filmmakers – Don’t Tell Me, Show Me

Action Over Words

Some films, such as comedies, are usually reliant on word play and humorous conversations in order to be successful.

However, most other films are the exact opposite.  Words are far less important than image, than action and mood in films such as dramas or action films or thrillers or suspense.  In those cases, talking too much is absolutely the wrong thing to do.

Turning words into imagery is an area with which many Christian film makers struggle.

Film is cinema, moving images, yet there a lot of Christian films that spend more time talking about faith or moral challenges than they do showing it.

A simple example of imagery over words is the use of the girl in the red dress in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.  One could use 30 script pages telling the audience about the loss of innocence, the depravity of the Nazi’s treatment of the Jews, concentration camps and the repulsion of war.

The girl in the red dress.

Or, you can sum it all up in a single image of the girl in the red dress, in a black and white film, wandering among the mayhem amidst German soldiers, perhaps unaware of the events unfolding around her.

Later, when you see that small body in the red dress, now lifeless, flung onto a cart before being dumped into a fire, you realize that even she could not escape it.  That single image spoke more than words could ever speak.

We, as filmmakers, have to try and use imagery over words whenever possible.

Christian filmmakers, however, struggle with that approach because the Gospel message is most familiar to them as text in the Bible.  As words spoken by preachers.  Even though Jesus was exceptionally adept at using parables, stories to illuminate messages, we often struggle taking his words and illuminating them in images.

The end result is that, often times, the momentum of a Christian film will screech to a halt so an appropriate Gospel passage may be quoted or read.   If it were not the Gospel of Jesus, filmmakers would not allow such a thing to occur in their script.  Why?  Because it’s bad cinema.  So, we must do our best to overcome that and layer in that message in visual information and plot.

Instead of telling us how the father saved his child, but died in a hunting accident, show us how the father died in a hunting accident.  If your great grandmother was abducted by aliens, show us, don’t tell us.   When in doubt, always show the action.

Another challenge facing Christian film makers trying to turn words into imagery is that it takes three resources that are often in short supply… time, effort and money.

John Snell and Brian Shea in Club God.

In our short film Club God, we were able to shoot 14 pages of dialogue in four hours.  Why?  Because the film is about a comedian trying to help God with his comedy act.  It’s a conversation and, for the intent of the short, such a dynamic worked.

However, if I were to try and remake that short into a visual piece, it would take three weeks, 10 locations and five more actors just to make it work.  Visual cinema is hard work.  It takes thought and patience and creativity and perseverance.  That all equates to time, effort and money.

Some genres necessitate striking visuals over dialogue (action and horror, for example).  If you’re playing in that genre, then you’ll have to shoot cinematic films.  If you can’t, then perhaps you should pick another genre and another story.  After all, the goal is to make a successful film, to reach the audience, to keep them engaged.

Redundant Repitition

Another thing we’ve noticed from a lot of films is that information is unnecessarily repeated to the detriment of the pace of the film.  For example, if my character is going for a big job interview and he tells his friend in the first scene, don’t have him repeat all of the information in a later scene with his girlfriend and again later when the character talks to his mother.

Once the audience knows the information, they know it.  It’s your job to write a script that doesn’t required repeating the information.  If you have to repeat information because other characters are unaware of it, the audience has to wait for the characters in the film to catch up.  That’s never a good idea.

Instead of repeating the information to the girlfriend, have her already know from the nosy best friend who’s dating the main character’s buddy.  Instead of repeating the same information to the mother, have her assume the interview already happened because she always forgets what day it is… do anything other than repeat information.  Not only does it lack imagery, it’s downright boring.

Watch Without Words

A long time ago I used to make films on silent Super 8 film.  It was a real challenge because you had to speak visually.  I was inspired by the films at the latter part of the silent era, where filmmakers such as Cecil B. DeMille, Charlie Chaplain and D.W. Griffith told both funny and complex stories without uttering a single word.

When I first delved into the realm of microcinema I decided to again challenge myself by making a film without words called Justice.  It was a film about stolen secrets, $250,000 in cash, a resume and a pipe-bomb that fill four briefcases of four people. In a single day, their lives intertwine and their fates are decided by justice.

Tim Osterhout in Justice.

The half-hour award-winning film was difficult to write.  It’s amazing how much we rely on words to relay our thoughts.

When filming Citizen Kane Orson Wells came to learn of the power of imagery.  Having come from the theater, he wrote the script with a lot of monologues for the main characters to say.  While filming, however, he realized those words were unnecessary if you relay the information with the right camera angle, the right lighting, the right movement.  He ended up cutting out all of the monologues because the images he was creating with the camera made the words redundant.

When you put your director’s cap on, look at each page and ask “how can I express this visually?”  This may be harder if you’re also the writer of the script, but a good reading experience does not equate to a good visual experience.  Different mediums require different approaches and different outcomes.

Here’s the test… if you can watch a film without sound and get engaged, understand it and follow it, it’s a successful visual film.  If you are lost because it’s only some talking heads with no visual hint as to who is good and who is bad, whether what they are saying is positive or negative, whether one person is their sister or wife or lover, then you know the film is not using imagery.

Take those words and mold them into a wonderful visual message that will haunt your audience for years to come.  It’s what makes cinema so powerful and so special.

Let us use this wonderful tool to the best of our ability to praise the Lord with visual stories that will touch souls and change lives.

Next time… Good, Evil, Precious and Crying.

Tips for Christian Filmmakers – The Three Fundamentals

We here at Sonlight Pictures watch a lot of Christian movies.  It’s part of the gig.  We do it to support our fellow filmmakers and to see what our competition is bringing in the way of production value and innovation.

Through this extensive viewing experience we’ve been noting “lessons learned” from some of the areas these films have done successfully as well as areas for improvement.

We are painfully aware, as fellow filmmakers, just how difficult it is to complete a film, let alone a successful one.  However, we feel that we should always push ourselves to be better with each production and expect the highest standards possible that we can reach.  Over the next few blog entries here we’ll be offering up some advice to fellow Christian filmmakers on key areas of storytelling that are most commonly missing in the current crop of Christian films being made today.

Let’s start with areas that would seem obvious, however, due to budget constraints, can sometimes be harder to achieve than one may think.  They are the Three Fundamentals of Film making.

The three fundamentals of film making are… I need to see it, I need to hear it and I need to believe it.  If any one of these three key elements is missing the film will fail to deliver.

• This means that lighting and direction need to be successful (see it)
• Audio needs to be loud enough, without distracting background noise and words need to be spoken clearly (hear it)
• The story logic needs to make sense and the actors need to be able to relay the emotions and lines effectively (believe it).

Our job as filmmakers is to create a world that the viewer will embrace and within which they will become emotionally involved.  We should avoid any and everything that will pull our audience out of that one moment we’ve spent so many months of writing, shooting and editing to make work. If it’s a bad line reading or a weak visual choice or the story simply doesn’t make sense… any one of these will undermine all of the efforts we’ve done to tell our story.

Alfred Hitchcock was a master, a genius really, when it came to understanding what the audience wanted.  He used this insight to his advantage by choosing when to give an audience what they craved and when keeping things from the audience in order to create suspense.

To understand what I mean, simply watch the scene from The Birds where Tippi Hedren smokes outside the schoolhouse while the birds gather on the jungle gym.  He gives us some information, sets our expectations, then keeps information from us, then when we think we know what’s going to happen next, he surprises us with a result we never saw coming.

Above all else, Hitchcock wanted you to embrace the central character and feel the emotions tied to the obstacles that faced them.  He also understood that if your story does not make sense, if your character makes a decision that the audience would not make, they will turn on the character and actually wish them harm.

For example, if you’re in a house alone and you think there’s a bad guy in the closet, well, you DON’T open the closet!  You run to your neighbor and call the cops.  Opening the closet door is NOT a decision the audience would make.  So, if the character makes a bad decision like that then the audience will lose all connection with the character.  Whatever bad things happen because of the decision, instead of feeling empathy, the audience will respond by saying to themselves “Well, you deserve it!  That’s what you get when you open the closet door!”

Story logic is key.  The story has to make sense.  The characters decisions have to make sense.  This is not a challenge in Christian films alone, but in film making as a whole.  It sounds simple, but not everyone is aware of the general audience expectations.  What makes perfect sense to the lone writer may not make sense to the public at large.

We recently watched a Christian film where the main characters were forced to play a “game” in order to uncover a mystery.  The game conveniently happened to be within the skill set of the main characters.  The problem was that the villain had no legitimate reason for the game to exist in the first place.  It did not benefit the villain or their plans in any way what-so-ever.  It was simply there so that the main characters could participate in the mystery.  We kept watching the story saying “Well, that’s cool and all, but why would the villain do that?  It makes no sense!”

Story logic is the first and most important component in the three fundamentals.  It precedes the making of the film.  It is defined before one figures out how to light it, how to capture the audio, how to direct it and if the actors can pull it off.  Make sure the story works.

Writing is the cheapest part of the film making process.  Take your time and get it right.

Next time…

Don’t tell me, show me.

Where is Our Wealth?

“How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!”

Often times in my youth that line from the Gospel of Mark was used by Pastors to talk about the financial needs of the community and of the parish. It wasn’t given as a direct connection, but more of a bridge toward a conversation between those who have and those who don’t. A twinge of Catholic guilt would also wash over me and make me wonder, in my youthful faith, if making money would condemn me.

A few years ago I was at a mass in a nearby parish and they had a visiting priest from a poor African nation. After hearing this Gospel reading I sat back and said “Uh-oh… here it comes. Get out your wallet.” Then the priest started his homily saying something I never expected…

“This Gospel has nothing to do with money.”

I perked up. “What?” I thought, “but Jesus talks about how rich people can’t enter heaven,” I continued to mutter in my head.

The priest went on to discuss in detail how this Gospel was about those things that get between us and Jesus. For this man, it was money. For others it may be work, or vices or addictions or any number of things. The point Jesus was trying to make was that this person was a good person. He followed the commandments and was trying to understand Jesus’ message. But he could not release that which kept this good person from being a holy person, from reaching salvation.

He also stated that this young rich man was one of the few people, outside of the Apostles, that Jesus personally asked to follow him. He must have been very special indeed.

Yesterday, as this Gospel appeared again on our Liturgical calendar, our local priest, Father Diaz, elaborated further, stating that wealth does not assure condemnation no more than poverty assures salvation. He went on to discuss that in Jesus’ time, the Jews believed that one’s success in life was often tied to God’s blessing. As those with physical ailments, like leprosy, were believed to have such afflictions so that they may pay for their sins or the sins of their ancestors, so too would wealth and success be a sign of God’s graces upon them.

As scandalous as it was for Jesus to heal people, which literally symbolized forgiving their sins, so too was Jesus’ statement that the rich will have a difficult time entering heaven. The apostles were confused… how could wealth, a sign of God’s blessing, impede entry into heaven? Because, it offers too many temptations that block our way.

As Jesus later comments, it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it would be for a rich man to enter heaven. In its literal sense, this seems impossible. In it’s historical context, it offers a way through the pearly gates, as the eye of the needle was also the name of a small door.  In order for a camel to enter through it, it would require them to remove all of the baggage the camel was carrying and for the camel to get on it’s knees to pass through the door.

Expel our excess baggage. Get on our knees.

Two very practical and possible ways to overcome a seemingly impossible challenge.

So I must remember to always remove that which interferes between me and Jesus, between me and holiness. As Jesus mentioned before, we must do whatever is required, such as cut off our hands, pluck out our eyes, take up our cross, die for our faith… we must do whatever is required of us to remove our baggage, get on our knees and with humility and purity embrace Jesus Christ.