The World In Our Midst
In October of 2010, The Woodlands UMC celebrated World Communion Sunday in a way they'd never tried - rather than having a missions-based sermon, they decided to have a series of videos about the state of the church in the world, interspersed with songs and liturgy. It was my responsibility to create the content around which the service would be built.
I went to shoot an interview with Jasi Blews, a former Bosnian war refugee, at her home. I brought two cameras to shoot on - a locked off profile shot for occasional cutaways and a handheld main camera. Unfortunately, all of the footage from the main camera corrupted, and I was left with the second camera as my only surviving footage.
I did a rough cut and looked at the video. It was still an interesting story, but the video couldn't be drier - six minutes of heavily-edited interview footage, with the time of day switching around in the background. I started to panic. I had 24 hours to get the video done and I was nowhere.
Jasi and I had gone over the sort of pictures I could use for the video, and she dropped a pile off. I scanned them all in, then took a camera and shot them by hand. I started hunting for footage everywhere online, ripping content from every site I could find that qualified for fair use. 19 hours later, with a few hours to spare, I'd managed to get a cut I was proud of together.
I wouldn't want to write this explanation without including the fact that I can't say thanks enough to Jasi and her husband Larry for their efforts on this project.