Weaving at the Prairie Arts Center from Chad Stembridge on Vimeo.

There’s so much I wish I had done differently or paid more attention to while capturing the footage during our mission trip. But I do believe it’s good that the story of Human Care School for Orphan Boys in Haiti is finally being told.

To learn more about what Heart of the Bride is doing in Haiti, check out their website.

We moved here to Illinois from Georgia in 2001. During the 2002 homeschool convention season, we went back to the conference we’d gone to for a while, run by the good ‘ol Georgia Home Education Association. That was the year we first encountered Rainbow Resource Center. Mom remembers it well, because “Toulon, IL” was unexpectedly on both our name tags and the Rainbow booth workers’ name tags. Turns out, we had moved less than 2 miles away from Rainbow.

Back then, I would have never guessed that one day, I’d be one of those workers on the “other side” of the booth.

To make a long story short, I got a job as a warehouse shipper for Rainbow in 2006. I worked there for almost 4 years, until the end of 2009 when I left to do full-time video freelancing. This past January I was hired again, this time as a freelance contractor to help with marketing and to be Rainbow’s video producer. Most recently, I’ve started going out on exhibit crews.

Working on an exhibit crew has been an incredibly fulfilling experience. It’s great to be on the front lines helping people in the homeschool community. And it’s fun to get to travel to different places. It also means doing hard work and putting in a couple long days during a convention, but it’s all good.

The reason I became involved with exhibits was to make a video to show people what goes into one for Rainbow. After a couple weeks of shooting b-roll here and there, interviews, and footage at the Peoria and Cincinnati homeschool conventions, it’s done. Here it is:

A couple weeks ago I spent the weekend in Southern Illinois with some friends. We went hiking in the Shawnee National Forest:

I also introduced them to night photography and light painting:

Last week Mom brought home the first plants for this year’s garden:

She also brought home a whole bag of garlic that was going to be thrown out. I was so happy about that, because I’m wanting to manage growing some of the root vegetables — specifically potatoes, onions, and garlic.

I’m not sure how much garlic I planted, but it’s quite a bit. Hopefully they’ll grow well enough to have more for planting this fall.

Tyler’s been working on fencing an extra section of pasture. We now have seven pastured animals: a quarter horse, miniature horse, cow, lamb, and three goats.

Jesus, Priceless Treasure is a German hymn that Bach wove into the motet. The melody was written in 1653 by a Johann Crüger; the words were penned sometime around 1650 by Johann Franck. So it goes back a way. When people wrote hymns back then, they weren’t afraid to go deep.

Having been immersed lately in Bach’s setting of the hymn, it’s been going through my head quite a bit. One benefit from working on a video of its performance is that, since it’s in German, I’ve become intimately acquainted with the text through the process of creating English subtitles for it.

It’s very comforting to know that, as long as I am in Christ, the powers of darkness in this world have no legal right to touch me. Christ is my Strong Tower! And it’s challenging to think about Jesus Christ as a priceless treasure — journeying to the place where He is worth more to me than anything else.

“Surrender” is the key word. Isn’t it ironic that during the times we tend to think that God’s blessings are overflowing, we are more prone to forget both His provision and His mercy? Surrender is often painful (literally, “full of pain”), because it involves giving up something I’ve claimed ownership over: possessions, dreams, relationships, hopes, fears, sins, idols, even good desires (because the best desires always come from outside, from Christ). Whatever season of life we might be in, surrender is crucially important — because surrender forces us to release the things we clutch at the most, and hold on to so much more firmly the One Who owns it all anyway.

The painful refining fires of God’s perfect love are beautiful things.

Couldn’t decide which to put first, some photos I made with a couple rolls of 35mm Fuji Superia 200, or photos from the 2012 SAICFF. So I guess I’ll post them in chronological order. Click on a picture to see a larger version.

Two Rolls of Fuji Superia 200

Lately I’ve taken a deeper interest in simplicity and manual things, and thus my interest in film. Film has a depth of character and warmth to it that digital has never been able to come close to… Maybe part of it’s because if you’re shooting film, you’re probably shooting full-frame or larger. Whose bright idea was it to make crop-sensor cameras the norm in the digital world, anyway? (For my less tech-savvy friends, full-frame means that a camera’s sensor is the size of 35mm film — 36mm x 24mm — as opposed to crop sensors, which are usually less than 28mm across, and say, cell phone camera sensors… which are, uh, way too small.)

Tyler driving the Mustang he bought last year:

In January Geno and I drove up from South Carolina for a visit and a snowboarding trip. That’s when Dad gave me these two rolls of Fuji Superia. We went for a little golden-hour photo hike along the creek near our house:

I have two film bodies, but my favorite (and the one I’m using pretty much exclusively right now) is the Pentax K1000 I bought for $25 off of eBay last year. It’s the Pentax ME-Super’s big brother, and is about as simple a camera as you can get without resorting to a pinhole camera. Dad bought his ME-Super when he was in college:

And of course, Tyler and Geno went along on the hike:

On our way back to South Carolina (where I stayed for a week before coming back to Illinois), Geno and I stopped for a day in Southern Illinois. We went to Garden of the Gods with our friend Kyle, and discovered the cave that Kyle and I explored a week later. Garden of the Gods is a very neat formation of rocks in the Shawnee National Forest:

It was icy that day, and icicles had it out for Geno for some reason. He managed to survive, thankfully.

A week later I was back in Southern Illinois visiting my friends there. We went on an extended hike in the woods, exploring some uncharted rock bluffs. These are some wild onions I found:

We finally came out to a railroad line, where we sat and rested for a few minutes. After a bit, a train came along! I switched to digital for the train, since I didn’t have to worry about wasting shots. Plus I could shoot at 5.3 frames per second instead of having to wind up each frame. So here’s my 35mm shot of the empty tracks instead:

Film is just a lot of fun to shoot, period. Its character is a good part of it. Being able to have my hands in the process of physically making an artful shot is another big part of it. But some of it is also the anticipation that comes with it — there’s no chimping with film. I have to wait until I shoot all 24 or 36 exposures before I can send it off and wait a week or two to see the images I made. And for some reason, that anticipation raises the value of those pictures so much.

I’d love to shoot a film on 35mm someday.

All of the above photos are untouched, besides resizing (one was cropped) and sharpening for web.

SAICFF 2012

So yes, at the end of February I attended the 2012 San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival:

It was neat to see Sforzando for sale on the vendor tables alongside some great films:

It was so much fun to get to be with friends I haven’t seen in a while, talk with people I’ve never met, and finally meet people I’ve communicated with but never met. I got to listen in on a bunch of interesting conversations during that weekend, and was struck by the amount of humility, honesty, and respect there is among the maturing Christian film community.

One man I talked with has been in broadcast for years and years, had a documentary screening, and has been on the learning path much longer than I have — yet he took the time to talk to me as an equal, to share his path of development of using his skills for God’s honor, and acknowledging that learning is a continual process. That’s special. You’d be hard pressed to find that at Cannes, probably even Sundance.

The DiMarias are practically family to me (I’ve spent probably 8 months of my life at their house), so I got to hang out with them a lot of the time:

One of my favorite quotes of the weekend came from Ezekiel, as he talked in front of a screening audience about the process he went through to make his animation, Jonah: “If you want to do animation, you have to have a lot of patience. If you don’t, you’re doomed.” That’s Zeke: matter-of-fact no matter who he’s talking to.

He had my camera for a bit one night, so the next photo wasn’t shot by me. But it’s worth posting here because it’s of someone special to me: that’s my adopted big sister Sage peeking around her brother John (that would make him my adopted brother, right? I have a lot of adopted brothers…). She and John came to help on a short film I made four years ago (it was that long ago?!?), Precious Treasure… Off the top of my head, I can’t even remember what her official crew role even was (John was Head Gaffer), but she was pretty much Assistant Director. She makes a very good AD. She’s been a huge encouragement in my life over the past few years that I’ve known her. She’s Simply Sage:

Of course, a major part of going to a film festival is watching films. I watched a lot of documentaries (there were a lot of documentaries there to be watched). My favorite was Captivated, on media overconsumption. It’s very thought-provoking, and hit home with a lot of things I’ve thought about over the past couple years.

Anth waiting for the start of a screening:

It was fun sitting in screenings of films I’ve had a part in. There were three: Jonah, which I scored; Sforzando, which I directed and produced; and Worth Saving, for which I produced the behind-the-scenes documentary. Here’s Hannah giving a little spiel after a Worth Saving screening:

A lot of people have asked me if Sforzando won anything. Nope. It never went beyond the semi-finals, but I wasn’t expecting it to, either. There were a lot of great documentaries that screened this year. Yes, Sforzando was competing — but that wasn’t the point. Its point was to bless, encourage, and educate people, and I feel incredibly grateful that it’s been able to accomplish that purpose in a larger circle of influence than I had first imagined.

So there, that’s a peek into some highlights from the past couple months of my life!

The hair on my chin was getting a bit… Uh, poofy… So today I decided it was time for my first real beard trim (other than the touch-up I’ve maintained since growing it out).

And thus, I present to you, before and after:

Not sure why I have such a strange smile in the “after” photo. That was about the time I was contemplating giving myself a whole-head trim with the razor, I think… Yeah, I need a haircut.

And some other random news:

• My first novel, My Mom Chose Death, is now available on the Apple iBookstore for iPad. It’s still available on Amazon.com and Createspace, too.

• Sforzando, the documentary I made last year, is screening next week at the 2012 San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival. I’ll be there, flying in on Wednesday, February 22!

• Also regarding Sforzando, Vision Forum has begun selling the DVD on their website. It’s also still available on Amazon.com and Createspace, of course.

• Recently I’ve finally gotten to dive into a bunch of footage from a mission trip I went on last year… More news on that soon, hopefully!

• Last but not least… For those of you who knew I was in South Carolina for a while, I’m back in Illinois. It was great getting to spend time with all my DiMaria brothers for three months, and I’m very grateful to Geno for bringing me down there to work on video projects with him. But yeah, I’m back in Illinois, freelancing for Rainbow Resource Center and working on some other projects in my spare time.

All photos are unedited, other than resizing & sharpening for web.