Please forgive me father, it’s been five months since my last update.
A funny thing happened to our production back in May – we lost our director and, with him, our production company. For personal reasons, Sam suddenly had to move to the other side of the country. Which meant he wasn’t going to be available to do the rest of the filming or the editing. All this happened with no notice. One day we were shooting, the next day he announced he had to move (his wife got a job in Adelaide). But fear not! The film is going to be finished. And soon!
With Sam’s departure, we decided to take a moment and test what we’ve got in the can so far – which is about 95% of the footage. We had already shot my presenter sequences / talk-to-camera parts for the first 18 minutes of the film, and we already have all of the scholar interviews, so we hired an editor to help us pull that together into an 18 minute teaser. We also got some animation produced for that section of the film. And then, a few weeks ago, we asked about a small group of 50-60 people to review the 18 minute teaser and answer a short survey – did they like the film so far, did they want to see more, what would they rate it out of 5 stars, etc.
Importantly, a little more than 50% of the survey respondents were Christians. Because it’s always been my intention that this film should be interesting and accessible both to Christians as well as non-Christians. And the overall review came in around 4.2 out of 5. Not bad, especially for a super low budget film, of which they only saw the first third, and considering the sensitivity of the subject matter. We also got some good feedback on ways to improve it, and we’re going to address those (mostly minor pacing-related) issues in the next phase. We also had a great suggestion regarding a better title: MARKETING THE MESSIAH. I like it, because that’s exactly what we’re talking about – how Paul and his successors (the gospel authors) marketed the idea of a dead Jewish guy as the messiah of the Roman and Greek gentiles.
So to finish the film, we’re going to raise some further funds to get the rest of the production completed before the end of the year – we need to film the rest of my presenter sequences, get 20 more animated sequences completed, and get it all edited together. There will be another Kickstarter campaign this month, at which point we’ll make the first 18 minutes available which we cant wait to show you, so please keep an eye out for that and please promote it to your friends!