short film in worship

Easter Journey DVD and postcards

Jeremy — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:24:44 +0000

You might remember last year I posted links to the Easter Journey animations we did at work at SGM Lifewords. A number of people used them in services and Easter events.

Just to follow up on those, the eight films are now available as high resolution downloads, or on DVD. We’ve also created a set of postcards, one for each day, for those who want to use them for daily reflections.

Like all our resources, they’re available on a voluntary donations basis.

See sgmlifewords.com/easter for details and to view the films.

Two SGM Lifewords projects

Jeremy — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 11:46:40 +0000

Not short films, but I ought to give a shout to two recent work projects.

Metavista – our theologian in residence at SGM Lifewords, Colin Greene, has a book out with Martin Robinson. It’s called Metavista: Bible, Church and Culture in an Age of Imagination, and it’s a very worthwhile read. I’ve been facilitating a blog to accompany the release. As yet there’s no discussion, but there ought to be – head over to meta-vista.org and leave Colin some comments!

Christmas 2008 – every year we release a new set of Christmas resources for churches, and this year’s site is now live and ready to browse. There are downloadable posters and invites, lots of very usable bits and pieces (I suspect that if you’re reading this site you’re probably pretty confident with your own creative projects for church, but you might find something inspiring). One of my favourite aspects is that for the last few years we’ve open-sourced our graphics, which means we get to play a kind of ‘where’s wally’ over christmas as our illustrations crop up in adverts, church websites, incorporated into prayer stations in relatives’ churches…

Using ‘the story of stuff’ in church

Jeremy — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 11:25:35 +0000

I’ve mentioned it before, but I finally got round to actually using Annie Leonard’s great little film The Story of Stuff in church last week. I showed the film and then we discussed it.

It raises all kinds of issues, about the environment, the exploitation of developing countries, and where we find our value as human beings. It’s enlightening, it’s funny, and because it deals with the whole process of consumerism from resource extraction to disposal, it’s a good place to start if you don’t know how much people are aware of the issues.

If anyone would like to try this in their own church, community centre, or youth project, the film is available as a free download here.

I used a bunch of stories from the gospels, and passages from the minor prophets, (who might as well have been writing about consumerism) as a basis for discussion. If you’d like those notes, with discussion questions and summary thoughts, they’re all here in Word format: story-of-stuff-notes1

Story of Stuff has recently gone international, with multiple translations available.

Sometimes it’s hard to change direction – The Crab Revolution

Jeremy — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:32:41 +0000

FutureShorts have just released their first DVD, which you can buy here, and among the 16 films is this little gem, The Crab Revolution. It’s by Frenchman Arthur De Pins, about the crabs of the Gironde estuary, which I visited on honeymoon in July in fact. The crabs can’t change direction, and when one does… You can watch it for yourself, and see if it reminds you of anything.

Metavista

Jeremy — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:05:53 +0000

Just a quick plug for the Metavista blog, which I’ve been updating today. It’s one of two blogs I keep an eye on for work (this being the main one). Today I’ve been posting some thoughts on the financial crisis from Rev Dr Colin Greene, author of Metavista: Bible, Church and Mission in an Age of Imagination, and our head of theology and mission here at SGM Lifewords. Worth a look, as is the interview with Paul Fromont below.

Sometimes

Jeremy — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:18:44 +0000

I saw this film and I thought immediately of September 11th. It is a striking example of a visual prayer, if you see it that way, of what is broken coming together again. With the anniversary coming up, I thought I’d mention it again.

It is by French design collective Pleix, with audio from Kid 606, and is available on the Onedotzero DVD 4.

Urban wilderness

Jeremy — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:03:47 +0000

Church on the Corner’s ‘Urban Wilderness’ session went pretty well at Greenbelt on saturday night. The potential for it to go horribly wrong kind of grew the nearer it got, but it worked and people got it and we were pleased and relieved. A Christian Aid blogger wrote a nice review of it here, if you want to hear all the details.

Mark has posted the Liturgy of the City here, if you’d like to use that. Our audio soundscape and the monologue ‘Thoughts of an ordinary girl’ will follow shortly.

We also used the opening pages of Jon McGregor’s novel ‘If nobody speaks of remarkable things‘, and Richard Fenwick’s film ‘People’, from the Onedotzero book Motion Blur.

Further down the chain, we drew inspiration from Improv Everywhere, SoundTransit, Postsecret, Dear God, and Luke 17:33.

By the way, we seem to have neglected to take photos of the event. If you were there and were responsible for some of the flashes I definitely saw, could you send something?

Urban wilderness at Greenbelt

Jeremy — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:43:48 +0000

If you’re at Greenbelt this year, let me invite you along to ‘Urban wilderness – the spirituality of the city’, hosted by Church on the Corner in the New Forms Cafe on saturday night. Here’s the blurb from the programme:

Christian spirituality has often focussed on escaping the noise and pressure of the city, so how can those who live in its midst find sacred space? An act of worship reflecting on finding Wilderness in the heart of the City.

Having married and moved out of London in the last couple of months I’m not really on the scene at Church on the Corner any more, but they’ve let me come and play anyway, and it’s been really fun helping out planning the session. I won’t spoil the surprise by posting the film and other stuff we’re using ahead of time, but come along, and I’ll tell you afterwards.

Immerse

Jeremy — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 09:04:48 +0000

Sometimes things that look scary at first are good for us in the end.

If you want this in a higher res, it’s available on Stash, issue 42.

Hopeinfo and iMatter

Jeremy — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:17:15 +0000

Hopeinfo.co.uk has been relaunched with a number of new films. The latest ‘girl musing on train’ Big Hope is quite similar to the ‘man musing on bus’ Fresh Hope, but it does have a vox-pops start that roots it in real life, and it should be widely useful in mainstream churches.

There’s also the iMatter series of ordinary people talking about their own hopes, and I quite like these. I was particularly impressed with Working on Hope, about a guy who works at a dockyard. Perhaps I’m easily and boyishly impressed by big machines moving in the dark, but it really is very well filmed.

There are six films on Hopeinfo at the moment, all downloadable. The four iMatter films are also available on DVD from RUN.