Go For (With) It!

I made this for a podcast or something similar for Amy-Jo Girardier.

I got the idea to use Elliott's toy trains but then forgot to bring them to work with me the next day, so I actually built this out of pictures I already had in iPhoto of him playing with them. If you look at it closely (or pretty much at all), you can tell very quickly how much of a hack job I did.

Music by The Champion.

More Did-Did Smease

Advertising Now!

Within the next couple of weeks, a bunch of youth ministers are going to receive a brown envelope with an Adventure Now logo in the mail. Inside, they'll find a DVD with a VHS-inspired face label that says "Watch This Now" (kudos to Amy Haywood and Liz Greggory for pulling this art together so quickly and so well). When they play the DVD, this is what they will see:


That will lead into the Main Menu. The first three videos they can watch are a series of character-centric promo's that we shot while in Hawaii:


And the last video on the disc is the OFFICIAL teaser for AdNow3 (the first one that some of you have seen was fairly similar, only much more infringing of music copyright laws - I originally made it just as a highlight reel for cast and crew). Enjoy:

Family Matters

This is one of my favorite excerpts from Donald Miller's new book. It reminded me of both of my grandfathers' funerals.

"My uncle told a good story with his life, but I think there was such a sadness at his funeral because his story wasn't finished. If you aren't telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died. But my uncle died too soon."

Tonight I caught a glimpse of myself on the security camera as I stood in line at the pharmacy. I'm not really sure why they see it necessary to show us their live feed of us waiting to receive medicine, but I'm sure they have their reasons. But tonight I looked up at the screen and realized that I apparently decided to dress up like my grandpa Bigby before going out to pick up Elliott's breathing medicine. I don't really have to try very hard to assemble this costume, truthfully, with the headstart of being tall and dark-haired and impatient while wearing glasses and having a nose that one could hang their coat on. Bigby pulled off this look, I can't confidently say the same for me.

It didn't help that I was wearing a green hoodie. I might as well have been sitting in a big unnaturally comfortable chair with an ottoman right their in the Walgreens, sporatically falling in and out of sleep.

My immediate thought was the standard gut reaction we all have when we find out that we look like our family: "Oh damn it. How did this happen? I thought I was paying attention. I was trying so hard not to look like (random other family member) that I lost all objectivity."

But then I thought, "wait a second, what's so bad about looking like Bigby?" I wondered if I was actually scared by the possibility that I was actually turning INTO Bigby. But THEN I thought, "and that's bad, why?" I realized I was just percieving this as a negative thing because that's how I feel like I'm supposed to react to the process of mutating into a family member.

Then in that splitsecond, I remembered Bigby's funeral. And I remembered this Don Miller quote. And I remembered being able to stand in front a whole bunch of family members and Texans and call Bigby the single most impatient human being alive who had the most intuitively solid understanding of priority and what things in life were truly worth waiting on. I remember how that room felt that day, like a really really special and one-of-a-kind man had left too soon.

And then I was actually kinda proud to look like him. And then I realized that the only time I should really start to worry is when I look up at the security screen and realize that I look like my brother Matt. That's when I'll probably try to kill myself. Because he's really ugly.

The Great Puk-Puk

 
We paid another visit to Gentry's Pumpkin Patch (aka The Puk-Puk Batch) this weekend, which has become Elliott's favorite place on planet Earth. As you can see here in these pictures.