We Have Arrived

After seven months of waiting — the Media Team has finally arrived in India. Praise!! I have to say, it feels absolutely unreal; when a trip gets postponed for so long, part of you wonders if it’s ever going to happen. It wasn’t until we were off the plane and walking towards Customs that I was finally able to feel butterflies of excitement; we have arrived — and without any complications.

For having travelled nearly twenty-four hours and jumping 12.5 hours ahead of our time zone, I can speak for us all — we’re a very spry group. Fully awake and eager to get out and start exploring Old Delhi. We stepped out of the airport at 7am local time and were greeted by one of our hosts and the most wonderfully warm overcast morning. Upon arriving at our guesthouse, the air was filled with the scent of spiced chai — nothing at all like “an assault to my senses” as many people have warned about. I suspect that we will have that experience at some point, but I’m glad for the lovely welcome.

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A Second Chance

We have some new developments to share. I’m hesitant to label it either good or bad so I’ll just spill it: Mia’s mother is alive. Normally great news, yes, however the revelation unearthed some daytime-television-worthy drama amongst Mia’s relatives. As one could expect, this launched a whole new world of emotion for her and set Mia’s mind to wonder why she ever wanted to search for her family in the first place. It’s a worthy question for someone who’s been through everything that she has.

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He is Sovereign

We are headed to India as a media team prepared to document a story about a girl reuniting with her family after being dropped off at an orphanage nearly 20 years ago. We want to show the successes she’s had since graduating college in the fashion industry and get a glimpse of what life is like in New Delhi for her now. We will take her back to Child of Mine’s Dar-ul-Fazl Children’s Home so that she can reconnect with the staff who became her pseudo family and reminisce over the childhood spent in the hills there. Then we would change direction and head for the family she never knew; reconnecting her with the mother who gave her a life that she couldn’t give Mia herself.

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Our Journey Has Begun

Well it’s Monday and we should be in London right about now and looking for the terminal that will take us through the other leg of our trip, to Delhi.  While the Construction Team does all that on their own (and connects with our team photographer who was already there), I and the remaining four Media Team members are still in Vancouver.  We are waiting for Journalist Visas for the four which are taking quite a bit longer than anyone thought.  Our journey has begun, it’s just starting out a bit differently than we had planned.

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Child of Mine: We Need You!

We’re excited to announce that in just one month, we’ll be going to India for two weeks to shoot a not-for-profit documentary showcasing an organization called Child of Mine. This project has been a long trip already for us – we knew that we’d like to do this project as long ago as a year now, and since then we’ve been working on getting together the right people and the right story together. These things are all falling into place, and the only thing we need to come together are the funds!

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Best Compressor Settings for Vimeo v2

We’ve had a lot of comments & questions on our blog post on how we encode video in preparation for uploading to Vimeo, which is the video sharing service we use. In this post, we’ll go more in-depth on what settings we chose & why, as well as a better way of getting the right codecs & settings up and running on your machine. This will probably work for other video sharing services as well, although we haven’t tested them.

 Vimeo recommends encoding using H.264, which we do also, but we use the x264 encoder instead of Apple’s default encoder. We’ve found that videos that are encoded in H.264 using Quicktime sometimes have gamma problems or experience heavy banding. And who likes banding? As a side note, there are other ways of dealing with banding further up your pipeline – Nick Vegas over at Greyscalegorilla has a great post on this.

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The Gospel & Teaching Through Media

Before you read, take a look at this. I have thoughts, I have questions…

I picked this particular piece because it seems to typify the kind of Christian media I think the most about. Why?

It’s the content; what’s being taught by implication or otherwise. As storytellers, filmmakers, creatives, our primary concern should always be the content, and the style can follow suit as of secondary importance. I think style has increased very well over the recent years, and can only get better and diversify as Christians who happen to be artists regain their calling.

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