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I first picked up a video camera when I was about ten years old. So, all throughout high
school and just growing up I was always making movies with my friends. I knew that that's
what I wanted to spend my life doing. I never really looked back since.
Biola's film program really stood out to me at the time just because of the resources
that they had and the way the program was structured to give the students a lot of freedom
to create their own program and figure out what it was that they wanted to do, find their
place in film.
While I was a student still at Biola, I formed my company, New Renaissance Pictures. A lot
of the ideas about how I wanted our company to operate and what I wanted us to do came
out of my education at Biola.
Every year Biola has a Media Conference for Christian filmmakers and artists, and one
of the years was actually focusing on the new renaissance and what that meant for Christian
storytellers. It struck me when I first heard that concept, that, as we as Christians learn
how to become better filmmakers, we have the opportunity to bring about another renaissance
of incredible art.
And so, I took that as sort of my calling in terms of what I need to do at Biola and
beyond was to be one of these people who would further a renaissance in film, and a renaissance
for Christian storytellers. It's just a cool part of the way God's created this world that
the stories that resonate with us are the stories with truth.
Whether it's a fun story, like a "Star Wars" or a really dramatic film like "The Shawshank
Redemption", they're films that are infused with great truths. The parts that we remember
are the parts that are God's truth.
Everything that my company does now is focused on how we can better tell stories, better
communicate the ideas of our faith in solid, entertaining ways.
We saw the rise of YouTube and just the overall popularity of online video and that we had
a chance at this very special, particular time in history to be ahead of the curve and
to do something that nobody was doing yet.
The audience loves short snip-its, short little three to five minute videos. And so, the question
was, how could we tell these longer stories that we wanted to tell, these feature length
films to an audience that wants to get things in little bite-sized chunks?
We realized that the old way of telling stories, the serial model, that they used to have back
in the thirties, could still work today. We could still chop up these longer stories,
tell them in these snip-its, and kind of break the model in that way.
When we started we had no idea what the response was going to be like for our shows, whether
anyone would watch them. And so, to very quickly have the support of YouTube and to have tens
of thousands of people watching every week was a huge shock to us.
We're competing in an industry that's relatively new, that's also populated by large studios,
well-funded operations, and it's neat to see that the playing field is level enough right
now that we can do that, that we can have our stories just as well as they can.
I love that Biola is preparing young Christian filmmakers to tell good stories. We have the
opportunity now for anyone to pick up a camera and make a movie. The challenge and the important
thing is telling good stories with film, understanding how the art form works and what you can do
with all of these tools.