Have you ever looked at something and thought “ How hard can it be? “ The good news for us is that we knew how hard it was going to be before we started. We fully went into doing this project expecting God to show up because within ourselves all we had was our availability. And being involved in so many other ministries down through the years we were blessed to experience instant results from actions taken in through obedience or by faith, but this would be different.
This project has caused us to learn more about ourselves but better yet more about God. Within a 24 hour period all of this started, then over the next three weeks God confirmed it through other people and situations. Since that Sunday we have had it on our hearts and minds every single day.
Things that held us back were lack of knowledge, lack of equipment and the unknown. Some things that helped us…..we knew God was in this regardless. We had countless people and places open up to us that would have never happened any other way but through God.
But we had to learn a few things. The bible says study to show yourselves approved. God wants us to do things with excellence. A preacher must prepare his/her message, a singer/musician must practice their craft because you just can’t step up to a platform and present something that you know nothing about.
The great thing God did for us was that He granted us favor. We began to connect with other like minded souls and were able to sit under other great filmmakers and learn from them. We began to see needs in every detail of what we were attempting to do. We all know for every action, there is a reaction and some showed us where we were weak.
We had no clue about storyboards, the true art of lighting, angles, etc. We were lucky enough however to be working with actors who had stage experience. So as we began to film early on it was not clicking for us. Ask any craftsman and they will share with you that you can not have enough tools. The better the tools you have the better the finished product will become. So as we learned about each tool we needed we prayed for provision so that we could obtain it.
When we began filming on locations we soon realized how hard the sound, the lighting and the time that we did not have was becoming a problem. Then dreaded complete halt that none of us will ever wish to talk about happened all over the world. But we used that time to research what we desperately needed and made goals, to obtain them.
We decided we would make sets for all of our indoor scenes for our offices, jail cells, and other spaces and this would allow us to get better results in the quality of our over all product. And don’t you know it, one of our prayer team partners built sets for trade shows, big box home stores and another couple had been building sets for live theatre productions for 15 years. So we are continuing to finish up on these sets and other projects as they are needed.
God blessed us with so many other items needed such as cameras, lenses, flags, c stands, gimbals, jibs, lighting and one of our biggest needs was storage space and God just provided us with that over the past week. We needed the space to store raw footage for color grading, editing etc. again to better our product.
So, as we are today planning out our year, we reflect upon where God has brought us from. The delay for us, was the greatest blessing because it allowed us to gather what we needed for the journey. With what we have we are positioned to do more episodes of Everlasting Hope in the future. Yes I said episodes!
The current script we have for this film is about 70 percent real life stories. Some scenes were added so that we could tie several different moments in time to adapt them to our storyline. We have created an environment for more to come out of Hope County IF, God allows.
We have seen so many miracles of God through the eyes of people involved in this project through their own experiences as well and we would love to use our characters to share these awesome stories of hope. We are researching the best way that we could share and minister through Everlasting Hope looking at different formats of distribution. We feel that God has called us to be globalist missionaries through media formats rather than theatrical one time experience.The two are very different from each other.
So today our current needs remain as follows. We are looking for a space big enough to house our sets for a short time frame to film in. We are in need of EMS equipment and a cop car or two which we know that God will provide as we need them. He has provided every need as we needed it and will continue to do so.
Please be in prayer with us as we transition into 2022 for Favor, Timing, Discernement, Provision, Place and Purpose. We will be sharing videos and photos of behind the scenes this year right here on our website. And we would like to thank all of you that have worked, are working and will work with us in the future on these projects. It truly is a community effort with no one person gaining glory only but God. And to the people and businesses that wish to remain anonymous that are helping us move forward we love you and God sees your gifts of sacrifice and will bless you all accordingly.
Sparrows Cottage Films is all about Real People, Real Stories, Real Life and the sharing the good news of Jesus Christ!
Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. Philippians 1:6