Just wrapped up three days of shooting with the film crew from Switchvert. Love those guys! So creative and so easy to work with! We worked together on a project called Surrendered and Untamed which will be released by Baker in February ’11. Here’s a trailer for S & U.
Thought I’d share some behind-the-scenes reflections from our shoot.
We had a pretty tight budget for the Primal DVD so we shot everything in DC, but DC is a filmmaker’s paradise! So many unique places to create very artistic shots. You also have lots of extras on call all the time! Just hit a metro stop!
We hit the National Arboretum to shoot by the 22 Corinthians Columns that used to grace the East front of the Capitol. My favorite shoot was at the National Cathedral. So majestic! We were shooting one scene in one of the little chapels in the lower level and a guy walked through who was reading Primal. Pretty funny coincidence to bump him while we’re shooting the DVD for the book, or maybe I should say providence. We did one shoot at the Central Union Mission. Amazing ministry that has been reaching out to the homeless since 1884. It was actually established to minister to Civil War Veterans. We also did some shooting on the metro which was a little ackward. Lots of stares!
For one chapter we rented a taxi and drove around DC for about 90 minutes. We had a jeep that we jerry-rigged with two cameras. The taxi driver we hired has been driving a cab in DC for more than 50 years! We did it during AM rush-hour and I think we got honked at about two dozen times.
The shoot was absolutely exhausting! We started each day around 5:30 AM. Yesterday we shot till 6 PM. I actually lost my voice on the very last segment. So why work so hard on something like this? Because I think that Primal is a movement waiting to happen. Books don’t become movements, generally speaking, if they don’t become viral. And one way a book becomes viral is when it’s read in groups–small groups, book clubs, sermon series. That creates conversations and those conversations lead to a new vocabulary and that new vocabulary is the language of change!
The Primal DVD will release in November ’10.
