What does it mean to be a Christian
in the film industry?
This is something that has been on
my mind for a while now, especially when I decided to pursue animation, and
when we brought in up in class, I couldn’t help but wonder really, truly, what
it means.
All
I knew was the stereotype. Ya basically either do Veggietales or make good, but
not good, movies like Courageous. And that worried me. Not that I don’t love
both of them; but nowadays media is at it’s peak, and there doesn’t seem to be
a lot of room for religion. In all honesty, if you say there’s a Christian film
being released, you’ve already lost a lot of your audience.
So,
using the magic of Google, I looked up Christian filmmaking, and found an
article that was basically titled “Stop Making Christian Films’. Uh….?
Naturally, I opened it, ready to get really angry or for some kind of religious
shock. But I was surprised, and as I read the article, I began to understand.
The man interviewed, Lee Stanley, is a
Christian filmmaker, and is also pretty successful, at that. But his advice? “Not
to hit people over the head with the Gospel”. He says we shouldn’t “scare
people away with our testimony” and instead focus on keeping God first in our
hearts, and getting the message to those “who don’t already believe”.
I
think a lot the points he makes are true. Once a movie is labeled as something
religious, it’s almost bound to go downhill in Hollywood. I think we should become
masters of our craft, and work hard. As Leeper said, we need to focus on that
first, and in time our art will become the explanation of what we believe in.
God will help shape our vision.
So it’s up to us to realize what we
want to do next, right? We are the new generation of Christian filmmakers. We have to make
the choice of how to keep our faith and get the message out there to as many people
as possible, and not just to those who already know what’s up.
This is the article I read, in case you're curious!
Cool article!
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