14 Hours

So I just got done with a 14 hours film shoot, and it was awesome!  I started at 5 PM and finished 7 AM (although since I'm waiting for the guys from the bus company to come pick up the bus I'm still "on set")  Final day of shooting (our smallest yet only 7 hours) Sunday afternoon!

Yea for Producing!

I’m finally producing again! This is the job that I feel I fit in most with, it’s not as involved in the creative side. Producing is more of an administrative job, the producer is the one who gets everything together. The film I am producing is one that the school leader wrote and is now directing. The film’s setting is a man going to work, so I have been almost constantly on the phone with the various bus and train lines in the area trying to get a vehicle to film in. As well as a vast multitude of other small details that keep filming interesting.

We had our first shoot last Monday, it went from 9:30 AM to about 10 PM, it was long. We are shooting again tomorrow night (Friday) from 6 PM to around 8 AM. It’s an intense schedule. I have been going through cycles of “hey I got this, everything is pretty much done and we are ready to go” to “AHHH! There’s no way to get all this done it won’t work and it all my fault.” But so far, it is getting done (and in time to shoot).

Finding God in the Atheist

I recently finished reading Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy.  The series starts with The Golden Compass, (originally titled Northern Lights in the UK),recently made into a movie, and finishes up with The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass.  This was the third time I have read them all.  The last time I read the series, I specifically looked for some analogy I could find, some good moral.  I grasped at every straw, looked beyond the names, but was unable to find any.  It seemed Pullman had succeeded in creating a book without God, (despite having God as a character).

I am against picketing studios and boycotting movies.  I laugh when I hear the reasons people boycott movies because their reasons seem extremely legalistic and just plain ridiculous.  I don't find the reasons against The Golden Compass ridiculous, because I have read the books.  (And I still watch the movie, and I want to see it again having finished the series).  Pullman is trying to, through this series, vaccinate (or indoctrinate, depending on your point of view), children against Christianity.  He is quoted as saying "I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief."  This indoctrination is about as clear as Lewis' in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and Perelandra.  It is very strong. 

This time I read the series, God pointed something out to me.  He showed me an analogy to the tower of Babel.  In the books the main characters (the main characters or "good guys" are all fighting against God), try to set up a world without "the trianny" of God.  But they can't really succeed because they can't live outside their own world for very long (they are all from different parallel universes).  The people come together to try to live without God and God scatters them, just like He did with the Tower of Babel.  In the books it is not specifically God scattering them, but it is the nature or laws of the world.  Me, being from a Christian perspective, see God as the author of those laws, and therefore ultimately responsible for the effects.

All the main characters "succeed", in that they reach their goals, but they are all left empty and sad, broken.  It made me smile when God pointed this out to me.  Despite Pullman trying to show people "God is Dead" he showed them (in fact one character even says it), life without God is lonely.  We need God. 

This book (and therefore Philip Pullman) has helped teach me more about the truth of God, the real one.  (Ha! Take that Pullman.)  Specifically, God doesn't just write His name in the heavens and in all the world around us.  He even writes His name in the fictional worlds of works by athests, there to be found.  If that's not proof that God has a sense of humor and is in complete control, I don't know what is.