It’s Here! It’s HERE!

I get a little antsy waiting for Christmas, Fridays, payday, and the next Star Wars movie. But I REALLY have been anticipating this – the release of the first video in the BIble Land Passages series!

This film is entitled “Jerusalem: An Unforgettable City” and it is really, really, really good (even if I am a bit biased!) And if you’re only here to see the video, you can skip to the end of this post, because now I’m going to catch y’all up on what has been going on since we left Israel on April 1, just four months ago.

Mat has been working his magic in the World Video Bible School studios. I don’t know how all that “magic” works, but I’ve been able to watch him standing at his desk in front of his two huge screens with all kinds of dials and buttons and graphs and hardware and software and cups of coffee and keyboards. He talks about “layers” and “drafts” and “rendering” and I nod intelligently and pretend to understand.

John, Rick, and Dewayne have been in the studio many times, filming voice overs and interviewing one another for their individual sections. Jon and Gary will be here this weekend (Jon lives in Kentucky and Gary lives in Tennessee,) where both will speak at our Discipleship University, but they will also head to the WVBS studio to begin their voiceovers and interviews. I’m excited to see everyone again!

Doug has uploaded the thousands of images that he captured on site, and he has been editing and cropping and preparing them for use in Bible classes and all kinds of instruction. They are absolutely gorgeous, and seeing them takes me right back to the place I grew to love and can’t wait to see again. Here is one of my favorites – you can almost smell the fresh, slightly fishy air and hear the gulls and imagine Jesus and His friends pushing off from this shoreline:

John and I are working on tagging and labeling all of these photographs so that they will be more usable and searchable…or rather, I should say we are SUPPOSED to be working on these. It is one of those things that keeps getting pushed to the back of the “things we need to do” list!

John has been obsessively (yes, obsessively, as in laying flat in bed, head propped against headboard with his computer perched on his chest, typing away until his fingers fall off the keyboard and he begins murmuring words like “Gihon” and “Shechem” and “Kidron”….just kidding about the murmuring, but all the rest is true…) working on future scripts, whittling down the number of words and “cutting the fat”  to make the videos an acceptable length, so that Mat doesn’t scream and have a heart attack when he sees the number of pages he needs to wade through, collecting images and video clips and background sounds to go along with the scripts. (Kids, that was an example of a run-on sentence!)

Let’s just take a moment to cheer Mat on… GO, MAT, GO!! YOU’RE AWESOME!! (And I’m not kidding…he is!)

I’ve had fun sitting in front of two big computer screens at WVBS (with headphones on to make me look important) and weeding through all of the video clips. I had to find all of the A roll (and many have asked the difference between A roll and B roll…A roll is video with someone speaking to the camera…B roll is all the rest) and then find the best take (there were usually three, or four, or five, or…..however many takes it took for the guys to feel good about it.) Then I transcribed it for them to use while they were preparing their voiceovers, so they had a refresher of what exactly was said, to avoid repeating themselves. I found some fun little clips, like this one where Doug walks into Gary’s shot at the Tower of David:

And this one where John pauses to celebrate after he nails his lines near Hezekiah’s Tunnel:

John and I have also begun preparing for our next trip to Israel during April 4-16 of next year. I’ve already shared this news, so I won’t repeat myself, but you can look our website here: http://www.biblelandpassagetours.com and plan to come with us!

But HERE is the best part: the first video in the series! There will be 20+ more, depending on how they decide to group them and combine them. Next up, I believe, is Rick’s video about Jesus in Galilee, and then Dewayne will have one ready (but I can’t remember which.) All of these will be available to view for FREE on the Bible Land Passages website. They will also be available for purchase on DVD later, most likely five at a time combined onto one DVD. I’m so thankful of Rudy’s vision and his desire for these videos to be available for anyone to watch, without having to purchase anything.

So here it is! Sit back and relax for 25 minutes. You can even have some popcorn. I needed tissues, because it made me emotional (I’m just weird that way.) Enjoy, learn, and see how these videos will strengthen and enrich your faith. All glory belongs to God – HE makes all things possible and HE opened the doors and HE wants His story to be told.