From Newt Gingrich, promoting his new work of historical fiction:

.
And to make the story To Try Men’s Souls [http://www.totrymenssouls.com] even more real to readers, we will be conducting a first of its kind twitter re-enactment of Washington’s crossing and the battle at Trenton.

Beginning this Sunday, Oct. 25, at 4:30 ET, Bill Forstchen and I will bring General Washington and the other historical figures of To Try Men’s Souls to life through twitter.

Twitter users can follow General George Washington (@genwashington76), Jonathan Van Dorn, (@pvtvandornNJ), and Hessian commander Colonel Johann Rall (@colonelrall), in real time as we simulate the crossing of the Delaware River and the attack on Trenton the following morning.

When I was in high school, after I got saved, my friends and I got together to hang out on Good Friday overnight… being all theater geeks at the time, we spontaneously erupted into several hours of playing the apostles after the crucifixion, arguing fearfully, hiding from passersby, trying not to get caught, imagining what it would be like to be in their shoes with Christ in the grave.

It was an amazing spiritual experience in improv.  I played Peter, so natch I got to be the biggest troublemaker!

Maybe we should do something like that for this coming Easter… start promoting a CF.org historical reenactment of Fri/Sat/Sun, with each of us who wants to play taking a role to improv - 12 apostles (someone gets to commit suicide!) plus all the women, plus if we get enough players, some Romans, some soldiers, Pilate, Herod, Pilate’s wife, the possibilities are endless.

It would be a 72 hour commitment (each could sleep, of course, depending on how they played the role - the folks back then surely slept, even if just fitfully), but it could be a ton of fun, attract quite an audience (if we start setting it up now) and get some publicity - and even preach the gospel.

Thoughts?

Curiously,
Calix

(...oh, and if anyone Twitters, I’d love to know what the Washington thing looks like…)

(...oh, and dibs on Peter again if we do this!)

“Academy Awards, USA: 2010

Just Announced…

Best Motion Picture of the Year
Winner: The Hurt Locker (2008) - Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Nicolas Chartier, Greg Shapiro

Best Achievement in Directing
Winner: Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker (2008)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role
Winner: Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side (2009)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
Winner: Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart (2009)

Best Foreign Language Film of the Year
Winner: El secreto de sus ojos (2009)(Argentina)

Best Achievement in Editing
Winner: The Hurt Locker (2008) - Bob Murawski, Chris Innis

Best Documentary, Features
Winner: The Cove (2009) - Louie Psihoyos, Fisher Stevens

Best Achievement in Visual Effects
Winner: Avatar (2009) - Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham, Andy Jones

Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Score
Winner: Up (2009) - Michael Giacchino

Best Achievement in Cinematography
Winner: Avatar (2009) - Mauro Fiore

Best Achievement in Sound Mixing
Winner: The Hurt Locker (2008) - Paul N.J. Ottosson, Ray Beckett

Best Achievement in Sound Editing
Winner: The Hurt Locker (2008) - Paul N.J. Ottosson

Best Achievement in Costume Design
Winner: The Young Victoria (2009) - Sandy Powell

Best Achievement in Art Direction
Winner: Avatar (2009) - Rick Carter, Robert Stromberg, Kim Sinclair

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role
Winner: Mo’Nique for Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (2009)

Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published
Winner: Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (2009) - Geoffrey Fletcher

Best Achievement in Makeup
Winner: Star Trek (2009) - Barney Burman, Mindy Hall, Joel Harlow

Best Short Film, Live Action
Winner: The New Tenants (2009) - Joachim Back, Tivi Magnusson

Best Documentary, Short Subjects
Winner: Music by Prudence (2010) - Roger Ross Williams, Elinor Burkett

Best Short Film, Animated
Winner: Logorama (2009) - Nicolas Schmerkin

Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen
Winner: The Hurt Locker (2008) - Mark Boal

Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Song
Winner: Crazy Heart (2009) - T-Bone Burnett, Ryan Bingham(“The Weary Kind”)

Best Animated Feature Film of the Year
Winner: Up (2009) - Pete Docter

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role
Winner: Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds (2009)”

Cha-ching!

1. Do it in March? Or April?

2. Have all entry fee income go towards the final prize. So if 50 people enter, and the entry fee is $20, the prize will be $1000.

3. More prizes?

4. How can we challenge everybody to do even better in the story department? Maybe we should call it the “Video Story Challenge.”

5. Do it as a 36-hour contest?

6. Have 3-minute videos? Our should we stick with one-minute videos? Ash says he might be able to get 3-minute videos on Crossbridge or Hulu, but the bar for story quality really needs to rise. We’re still having trouble with just a one-minute story.

Other ideas?

For those who are interested, we have finally gotten round to uploading Star Wars Episode 2.5.

Part 1: [youtube]v=BlraMas2Svc[/youtube]
Part 2: [youtube]v=mkGtI5pn8SQ[/youtube]

Will be interested in your thoughts, although it’s not really a serious film

Thanks for watching,
Brad

It’s Calix’ fault - he keeps recommending it. 

And, yes, I did a search already and still don’t get it.

My story:

I’m trying to figure out beats, partially because I’m editing Chasms and partially because I am working on a new script with a friend & trying to explain what beats are and how they work (and not doing a very good job of it). So therefore, I picked a movie we both were familiar with (Prince Caspian) and that I had instant access to, and decided to put the beats into Blake Snyder’s 15 beat sheet as found in the Tools section of his website. (it helped a lot to read that

It ain’t going very well. For one thing, the actual film is 137 minutes long - and it’s a 110 page beat sheet. And if 1 page = 1 minute, we definitely have a problem here—27 missing pages.

I found Calix’ Jurassic Park movie timing post. (embedded in this thread)It didn’t make much sense: it was basically anything interesting/violent/funny/something that moved the plot forward that happened onscreen. I thought I was just trying to see where the main beats as outlined on the beat sheet were?

I can post what I have so far if it’ll help anyone. I’m just confused on how this works and what my goal is…

(General disclaimer, as this is a site populated mostly by Christians: The only potentially offensive elements I know of to date is some sparse language and some violence, as Doraleous and Associates are warriors ... I don’t have any issues with anything in the show, but I’m also not one of the hardcore legalistic conservatives around here, so what do I know? )

Episodes are 3-8 minutes long and will be released every Thursday, starting tomorrow, only on The Escapist Magazine:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com

Look on their “Videos” tab, and you’ll find a short trailer they quickly put together. The music is a cue from one of the episodes followed by (most of) the main title theme.

They also have an interactive map of Nudonia (more below), which is pretty cool. As the series progresses, more of the map will get filled in.

The show takes place in what is basically medieval times in a land called Nudonia, and it’s about a good-hearted wannabe hero called Doraleous, and his friends/associates: Neebs (an elf), Drak (a dwarf), and Mirdon (a wizard). Think medieval times meets Lord of the Rings meets World of Warcraft (so I hear, as I don’t play), and general fantasy ... except with lots of laughs along the way!

The team definitely isn’t the brightest, and the guys don’t communicate very well, which, of course, leads to some interesting situations, seeing as they’re basically warriors-for-hire!

Anyway, it’s a cool show, and I’m proud to be a part of it.

Are any of you familiar with this event? Is it a party hard and have a good time crowd, or is there good useful information being taught? What about the music and film part, is it web related, or feature type films?

Street View

Entry View

Courtyard View

The return of religious films
Apocalyptic angels and satanic shadows are creeping back on to cinema screens. Don’t be surprised, says Anne Billson – biblical themes have only ever been one global crisis away
 

Anne Billson
guardian.co.uk,    Thursday 11 March 2010 22.30 GMT
Article history

Horror and fantasy have turned biblical ... Black Death

There’s been a distinct whiff of the Good Book at the cinema of late – literally so in the case of Denzel Washington’s latest, The Book of Eli. “Dear Lord,” he says, “thank you for giving me the strength and the conviction to complete the task you entrusted to me.” Denzel is on a mission from God, and not in a Blues Brothers way; his task is to convey a leather-bound book with a cross on it from A to B while killing lots of evil people en route. You don’t need to have seen the film to guess the book in question is not The Da Vinci Code.

Meanwhile, in Solomon Kane, James Purefoy says: “Satan’s creatures will take me if I stray from the path of peace.” Nevertheless, he kills hordes of evil beings and gets crucified in his quest to rescue an innocent. Elsewhere, in Legion, Paul Bettany plays the archangel Michael, who rebels against God’s orders to destroy mankind, saws off his wings and teams up with a handful of humans in the Mojave desert to shoot flesh-ripping zombies.

“Any artistic work that sensitively explores the stories of the Bible will be welcomed by many Christians,” says Ben Wilson of the Church of England communications office, “but clearly the extent to which any particular film helps to develop an individual’s faith will depend on the specific work and the specific viewer.” On the other side of the Atlantic, at Christian film campaign group His Only Son for Us, executive project manager Brittany Hardy says, “Though they still seem to have some way to go, it seems that Hollywood studios may be realising that biblically themed movies that herald justice, compassion and perseverance appeal to audiences.”

OK, some of the biblical themes in the aforementioned films are a little confused by Sunday-school standards, especially in Legion, where an unseen God acts like a stroppy teenager, while the archangel Gabriel comes on like an evil henchman with a rotating mace that looks like the Phantasm killer-ball on a stick. And that’s not the end of the holy horrors. Coming soon: Black Death, set in the dark ages, with Sean Bean’s faith tested by a beautiful witch. But you get the picture: horror and fantasy have gone all biblical on us.

Catherine von Ruhland, who reviews films for Third Way (a British magazine offering “Christian comment on culture”) points out: “Hollywood is undergirdled by the Judeo-Christian tradition, so the plentiful films that tell of a battle between good and evil in which good ultimately triumphs replicate that cultural myth. It also fits classic plot structure.” Von Ruhland adds that however secular and liberal the American film industry might appear, in a nation where the president must make a declaration of Christian faith, at least some of that nation’s cinematic output is bound to chime with traditional Christian values.

In fact, religion has long been a vital ingredient in horror movies, pretty much up there with the Big Two: sex and death. “Religious imagery provides a shorthand to meaning,” says Von Ruhland, “and if you want to capture ultimate and eternal dread, where else do you go?” In days gone by, when vampires were evil instead of soppy milquetoasts, they were kept at bay with crucifixes, holy water and men of the cloth. There’s no shortage of horror movies in which religion, or at least religious extremism or perverted faith, is itself the Big Bad; Witchfinder General springs to mind. But Von Ruhland considers The Exorcist a classic battle between spiritual good and evil. “Many Christians would not touch it with a bishop’s crook because of the possession theme, yet it is a profoundly Christian film,” she says.

Explicitly religious-themed horror movies have proliferated in times of global crisis and cultural unease. In the early 1990s, Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture starred Mimi Rogers as an ex-swinger who becomes a born-again Christian, prepares for Armageddon with a shocking act of violence and asks, “Who forgives God?” Tolkin’s film, along with the bigger-budgeted The Seventh Sign (Demi Moore versus the apocalypse) and The Unholy (Ben Cross versus a hot demonic babe), was part of a minor surge of relatively mainstream biblical horror that appeared towards the end of the Reagan/Bush era, coinciding with Black Monday and the first signs of an imploding economy.

But since the 1970s, beneath the radar of the average filmgoer, there has also been a steady trickle of low-budget apocalypse horrors funded by Christian-backed production companies and often distributed through churches and evangelical missions. In the 1990s, that trickle became a flood, though the films were still preaching to the American Bible belt. In Left Behind, the introduction of the euro is one of the signs of the coming apocalypse; in the forthcoming edition of his book Nightmare Movies, Kim Newman writes of Megiddo: The Omega Code 2, “As with most End Times films, the subtext is a paranoid justification of America’s tendency to demonise the United Nations, the Kyoto agreement or any other international body which opposes its interests.”

With the millennium looming, Hollywood joined the end times party. The low-budget Prophecy, clearly an influence on the angel versus angel deathmatch-in-the-desert of Legion, starred Christopher Walken as an evil angel Gabriel, battling the good guys for a crucial soul. Bigger budget biblical horror included Denzel Washington getting in some early anti-demon action in Fallen; Arnold Schwarzenegger versus Satan in End of Days; Pittsburgh hairdresser Patricia Arquette speaking in tongues in Stigmata; Johnny Depp searching for a satanic prophecy in The Ninth Gate; Kim Basinger learning her autistic niece is the second coming in Bless the Child; and Winona Ryder, in Lost Souls, telling Ben Chaplin: “You are about to become the antichrist who becomes the door to eternal suffering in this world.” Even Kevin Smith tackled God in Dogma.

But 2000 came and went without apocalypse, and the world as we knew it didn’t end until 11 September 2001. Since when, the trumpets have been sounding more or less continually for the global economy, western civilisation and the planet. Hollywood and allied film industries have stepped up their depictions of apocalypse, post-apocalypse and Manichean struggles between the forces of light and darkness. End-of-the-world films can be downbeat (The Road, Children of Men, 28 Days Later) or upbeat (2012, Zombieland), but in each case the protagonists are faced with quasi-biblical choices and questions of faith.

Explicitly religious thrillers such as The Body or The Sin Eater may not have made much of an impact, but Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ showed that a mutant hybrid of explicit religion, arthouse (subtitles, Aramaic and Latin dialogue) and horror movie (gore and demons) was capable of cleaning up at the box office. Budgeted at $30m (which came out of Gibson’s own pocket), it earned more than $600m, making it the highest-grossing subtitled film in US history.

With profits like that, it may seem odd we haven’t since been swamped with Jesus-horror, though The Reaping and The Gathering did reenact the plagues of Egypt and the tale of the wandering Jew. The Christian subtext isn’t exactly hidden in the Narnia films, like the CS Lewis novels on which they were based, but while the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost might not have made many guest appearances as themselves, they’ve had plenty of sci-fi surrogates in the form of Will Smith (I Am Legend), Keanu Reeves (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Constantine), Frank Langella (The Box) and assorted aliens (Knowing).

The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter films may not have been officially approved by the church, but they depict mighty struggles between good and evil empires, with Sauron and Voldemort essentially cast as antichrists. Even if some Christians have been avoiding the Potter films because of the magic, and the church frowns upon the idea of aliens being seen to do God’s work, secular audiences, whether they like it or not, are being fed a steady diet of Christian symbolism. Who needs explicit religious themes when they’ve been sneaking on to our screens in disguise all along?

Legion is out now. Black Death is released on 28 May