Awake at night

8 April 2016. Yesterday I finished my part in the post-production of Tamar. The IMM team has been working hard to lock down their completed portions.Sunday is the premiere in a small cafe in Madrid. From there it will follow the path of the two previous stories in the Women of the Bible Series. The stories of Ruth and Rahab have gone into places unknown, and still continue on the long distribution road that Biblical stories seem to travel.
Each story has been a learning curve for me and everyone involved. The IMM team has been audacious with every story and brave enough to move forward without regard to all the ways in which we could have fallen flat on our faces. I’ve had to learn and use different compositing software on each story, with names like Shake, Nuke and now the more familiar After Effects. I have poured myself into each of the 25 frames in every second of footage. I don’t bother counting after 90,000. I have sweated under technological challenges that have stalked me through many restless nights, and have struggled to quiet the accusations of the loudest critic: myself. I know that everyone involved in these productions have wrestled with similar doubts and challenges in the hours when the mind and body should have been getting rest and respite.
However, all of our travails mean nothing compared to the privilege  of watching the stories of women in the line of Christ develop year after year in the chilly basements of IMM. I have not seen fairy-tales emerge from our work. What I have observed more closely resembles stories ripped from the headlines. I have seen refugees, genocides, famine, cultural corruption, selfishness, lust, and women who are our Savior’s great, great, great, great, grandmothers (I didn’t count) caught in the no-man’s land between these all too familiar forces that sweep the Earth. They prevail and God’s plan always redeems the circumstances. I love working in the basement.