168 Film Festival Experience

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Several months ago our creative department at our church (Sugar Creek Baptist Church) decided to enter the 168 Film Project based in LA, California. The 168 Hour Film Project is an international competition where teams have 168 hours to produce a short film based on a theme and a Bible verse.

This year’s theme was “Hearing God” and the verse that was pre-selected and unique to our team was Genesis 7:1

The LORD then said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation.

Our challenge was to take that theme and verse and turn it into a story that we could finish in one week.  Rising Waters is the story of a righteous man who hears from God and tries to warn others about God’s impending judgment.  Principal photography covered 5 days at locations in Sugar Land, Bolivar Peninsula and Galveston Island.  Out of 80 films, Rising Waters was nominated for Best Sound Design and Best Scriptural Integration awards.  We were also selected to be on the Best of 168 Film Festival 2010 DVD.

Producing a short film in a matter of weeks was sometimes stressful but rewarding in the end.  The thing I loved about the project was getting to work with new people and the adventure we all sensed when we were trying to create something bigger than ourselves.

One of the main reasons we wanted to enter the race was because we believed that stories are powerful and the medium of film is the medium of our culture.  Knowing this we knew that we needed some type of contest to push us to begin telling these stories in our church and signing up for the contest gave us that deadline. Ultimately the project served as a great catalyst to push us forward in the right direction.

Since creating the film, we have begun to utilize more volunteers, develop scripts and have even begun production on several ideas all of which were birthed out of this movement of film-making in our church.

You can watch and share the film below.
If you have a low-speed internet connection you can go here.

Rising Waters from Sugar Creek on Vimeo.

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