2010-2014
As I explain in my About Me section, I was a leader in the youth ministry at my home church Colonial Hills Baptist Church from the summer of 2011 to the fall of 2014. During this time, the former youth pastor and I collaborated on many videos for the youth group, mostly funny videos with an underlying message, which he increasingly left under my direction and production. Other than my Wanna-Peas videos, these videos gave me the most experience I had thus far in directing, filming, and producing.
The majority of the videos in this section were made for an event called Disciple Now. Disciple Now, or DNOW, is an annual weekend event done by many churches. A typical DNOW goes like this:
Everyone meets at the church on Friday night for games, activities, then a lesson given by the youth pastor or a guest speaker. After the lesson, the night closes with a time of worship music, then the youth group breaks up by age and gender and goes to host homes of members of the church. DNOW usually has a curriculum paid for by the church with specific questions and lessons for each day. Every group has a time to talk about the day's lesson and then the kid are let loose to relax and do as they please for the night.
Saturday morning consists of having breakfast either at the host homes or at the church or otherwise designated meeting place for the weekend. After breakfast, there is usually an outreach project for the morning such as doing yardwork or painting for people in town. After this, there is an activity such as a scavenger hunt of challenges to do around town for set amounts of points and get evidence of on film. The group that does the most and has the most points wins a prize such as an iTunes gift card. After this activity, Saturday night plays out identically to Friday night.
Sunday morning, everyone wears their DNOW shirt for that year to church. That morning usually begins with students sharing something that they learned or experienced over the weekend which had a profound impact on them. Then the youth pastor plays a slideshow of the scavenger hunt challenge or other activity and announces the winners. Disciple Now concludes with Sunday morning church.
And there you have a typical Disciple Now. Now, the particular reason I explain this to you is so that you know the context for the DNOW videos on this page and (hopefully) better understand them. Each of our Disciple Nows had a theme; a lesson which we illustrated with the videos you see that led up to the weekend and aired each day of the weekend. Ours DNOWs from 2010-2012 consisted of a video playing Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday Night, and a conclusion video on Sunday morning. However, on the 2011 videos page, for your sake, 4 years later, I split the Friday night video into two separate videos. You will notice that some of these videos say "Crave". My eight grade year, our former former (x2) youth pastor made "Crave" the theme of our Disciple Now, as in a craving to know truth and seek the Lord, and this idea still lingers in the CHBC Disciple Nows. Thank you for taking the time to read this preface. If you didn't, these videos will be very odd and confusing to you. Now I will explain each block of videos.
Everyone meets at the church on Friday night for games, activities, then a lesson given by the youth pastor or a guest speaker. After the lesson, the night closes with a time of worship music, then the youth group breaks up by age and gender and goes to host homes of members of the church. DNOW usually has a curriculum paid for by the church with specific questions and lessons for each day. Every group has a time to talk about the day's lesson and then the kid are let loose to relax and do as they please for the night.
Saturday morning consists of having breakfast either at the host homes or at the church or otherwise designated meeting place for the weekend. After breakfast, there is usually an outreach project for the morning such as doing yardwork or painting for people in town. After this, there is an activity such as a scavenger hunt of challenges to do around town for set amounts of points and get evidence of on film. The group that does the most and has the most points wins a prize such as an iTunes gift card. After this activity, Saturday night plays out identically to Friday night.
Sunday morning, everyone wears their DNOW shirt for that year to church. That morning usually begins with students sharing something that they learned or experienced over the weekend which had a profound impact on them. Then the youth pastor plays a slideshow of the scavenger hunt challenge or other activity and announces the winners. Disciple Now concludes with Sunday morning church.
And there you have a typical Disciple Now. Now, the particular reason I explain this to you is so that you know the context for the DNOW videos on this page and (hopefully) better understand them. Each of our Disciple Nows had a theme; a lesson which we illustrated with the videos you see that led up to the weekend and aired each day of the weekend. Ours DNOWs from 2010-2012 consisted of a video playing Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday Night, and a conclusion video on Sunday morning. However, on the 2011 videos page, for your sake, 4 years later, I split the Friday night video into two separate videos. You will notice that some of these videos say "Crave". My eight grade year, our former former (x2) youth pastor made "Crave" the theme of our Disciple Now, as in a craving to know truth and seek the Lord, and this idea still lingers in the CHBC Disciple Nows. Thank you for taking the time to read this preface. If you didn't, these videos will be very odd and confusing to you. Now I will explain each block of videos.
Disciple Now 2010: The theme for Disciple Now 2010 was Family. The illustration for this theme was a character known as Awkward Alex, the awkward cousin. It is a common societal trope that every family has an awkward cousin, and if you don't have an awkward cousin, you are the awkward cousin. The Awkward Alex character, who you will recognize as my friend and Wanna-Peas co-star, Alex, was born out of a youth group trip to a Student Life conference in July 2010 in Orange Beach, Alabama. The event featured a character named Awkward Alan, adorned with more latex arm bands than any person should ever wear, and we reinvented this
|
character for ourselves with Alex. The former youth pastor, my friend and mentor, Russell, along with my friend and Wanna-Peas co-star Taylor, began this series as a preface for the Disciple Now that year. I make my first appearance in the Awkward Alex Powerade video, and later in the Chapstick video, at which point I began assisting in production, as this was the summer that Russell invited me to be a youth leader. Taylor plays a semi-fictionalized version himself as he goes through Life introducing unfortunate people to his awkward cousin Alex. The series culminates with Taylor and Russell attempting to introduce Alex to Travis White, real-life counselor and founder of the One Love Network, and former missions director at Colonial Hills.
SNL 2011: Over the course of May-July 2011, Russell and myself thought of a series of videos to garner interest in the youth group summer activities and increase attendance. Although they were not live, nor at night, we called these videos Summer Night Live (SNL). The videos have no dialogue or explanation whatsoever. The bizarre events in each video are self-explanatory. The theme of the videos was to exaggeratedly illustrate what you might be doing instead if you did not come to youth group, always concluding with the question "What else are you gonna do this summer?" The mascot for SNL was Alex as the Umbrella Man.
|
Disciple Now 2011: The theme for Disciple Now 2011 was essentially the same as the previous year. The lesson stressed family and community. The illustration for this year featured a study on dysfunctional families, which focused on not only Alex, but some extended family of Taylor's. The central event of this series was a family reunion initiated by Taylor. He We meet cousins of his who are just as, if not even more odd and uncomfortable, than Alex. After we learn about them from Taylor, we interview each of them and present them with Taylor's invitation to the reunion. These characters were born out of a brainstorming session over lunch at a local Mexican restaurant called Papacita's. Among them are Downer Dan, the cousin who always bogarts the
|
conversation with an incredibly depressing story related to the topic of conversation, Short-Tempered Tom, who is generally a laid-back guy, but gets easily upset by the smallest things, Condescending Chris, who has a chip on his shoulder and a superiority complex, and Emotional Eric, who is outrageously emotionally unstable. It is also at this point that the character of The Announcer comes into play, who returns later in the Crave 2012 videos. The Announcer narrates the events of the study and explains what is happening. The Narrator is very loud, monotone, and slightly eccentric. He never makes an appearance, and nobody knows who he really is. It is important to note that essentially all of the dialogue and happenings in these videos were improv. There was no script for any shot.
Disciple Now 2012: For Disciple Now 2012, we went a completely different direction. For these videos, we made parodies of popular TV shows. Alex makes a melodramatic return in the prologue, and then spends the weekend on the couch resting from an injury and watching TV. The Friday night opening video stars yours truly as a semi-fictionalized version of myself being featured on an episode of Hoarders. Saturday morning was Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Saturday Night was The Big Bang Theory, and Sunday morning was TMZ, featuring Russell, totally unbeknownst to him that he was being spied on for days to gather footage.
|
Thank you for taking the time to read this page. And thank you for visiting my domain and watching my videos. These particular videos are not necessarily pieces like one would put on a professional video portfolio, but they helped me phenomenally get practice in filming, acting, directing, and producing, and they are near and dear to my heart. Below is also a link to the youth group's YouTube account which features all of these videos, my 42-Second Sermons, and more. Note that on this page, the Crave 2011 Prologue video and Hoarders opening video are one and the same.