Video production continues on the Interactive Edition of “By This Name”. We have been keeping a busy shooting schedule but our crew is doing a great job.

My view of things

Steve capturing audio with the new boom mic.

Allan working the teleprompter.

Please pray for our video crew and the production. A complex project like this will have many challenges, but one of our biggest is noise from outside our office. We are very thankful for our studio, but we are located in what must be the noisiest part of town. Near us we have:

• a trucking company,
• a seed cleaning plant,
• a concrete plant,
• an autobody shop where they do sandblasting outside,
• trucks filling up with water just outside the studio,
• and then there are the train tracks just a few dozen meters away…

All these sources of noise cause many retakes and force us to take frequent breaks, but, despite this, we are still making good progress and our staff are encouraged with what we are getting filmed.
Here is a preview of one of the sections from the book. This video deals with explaining eternity, and how God has always been and always will be. He is without beginning or end. Eternity is, of course, difficult to understand and express to others, so we use some visual aids to help. This is from Chapter 2, Section 2 from “By This Name.”

I enjoyed working on this particular segment because it combines my interests in astronomy with teaching others about God. This one will probably end up being the most complicated one to edit as it involved many different video segments that I had to create with some free astronomy software (Celestia).

I hope to post more segments as I get opportunity to edit them together.

Being equipped with the right tools is very important to us here at GoodSeed. After all, we are making evangelism and discipleship tools to equip people to reach others for Christ. We do our best to make these tools high quality, be it the quality of the paper or binding of a book or the production value of a video. We do this so that they will last and not be rejected out-of-hand as cheap junk by someone investigating Christianity. I have personally seen a number of videos that have good content, but you have to be really interested to bear watching it because it is so poorly done.

A couple weeks ago we started video production for the By This Name interactive book. The first day was really just testing our ideas and equipment.

We did a morning of filming and then I started to edit it together to see how it was working. After reviewing it, we decided to purchase a shotgun mic just to test and determine if it provided better sound than our (really good) Lavalier mic. It is a big investment, but if we didn’t like the new mic we could always send it back. Here are the results of our testing:

After doing these comparison tests we decided to go with the shotgun mic as it seems to provide clearer audio. This will mean more work for us as one of our crew members must now become a boom mic operator (Steve’s arms will be tired!), but we think it will give us clearer audio for the rest of of the project.

Now that we are equipped with the right tools, we are diving back into our production schedule and are going to be doing more shooting this week. Please pray for our crew as we set aside our regular jobs and pick up cameras, slates, mics and other equipment.

I’ve been easing myself back into editing video, relearning how to use some of the software and trying new things, like the more-complicated-than-I-expected world of Closed Captioning. I have really enjoyed working through some of these videos and hearing the testimonies of God working in people’s lives as they come to a clear understanding of the Gospel.

Here is one of the first of a bunch that were shot by John Cross on a recent trip to Scotland  and mainland Europe. This is Anna, who was saved after reading the Portuguese translation of “The Stranger on the Road to Emmaus“. Watch this blog over the coming weeks as I will be putting up some more videos as I work through a stack of tapes.