Day 18 – Friday May 26

The Israeli desert is done. We packed up our rubber boots, towed our eighteen wheelers out of the mud and headed back into the city at about 5am this morning. A few hours of sleep and we’re into the Israeli underground command center. This is where Buck and Chaim witness the invasion of Israel.

I visited the set of that command center today. There was nothing appropriate here in the city (Toronto is seldom attacked) so we built it from scratch. It encompasses an entire 8000 square foot studio. I should have some pictures up on the website early next week.

Wow…$$$$$$ We set off so many explosions today that our ears are ringing and the good news is that just like in the prophesied invasion (Ezekiel 38) no one and nothing was harmed.

The life of a producer however is not just about making the movie. We are already working on the marketing and distribution. In the last 48 hours Paul and I have had meetings with about 20 different visitors to the set. A national Canadian TV Network (Global) was here to do a feature on how we turned Canada into Israel.

The Discovery Channel was here to do a feature on our camels and goats for a program called "Wild on Set" about animals in filmmaking. Several record labels (we are going to have great tunes) were here as were several distributors.

Five Christian magazines were here. The 700 Club was here doing a feature on the movie.

And we’d just said goodbye to the folks from People Magazine. We met with strategists and consultants and lawyers. There were two publishers here and we entertained a major securities company that wants to take Cloud Ten public.

We had story meetings and finalized the script of our next movie (tentatively called Trial by Fire, which we begin shooting in August. I really like this story a lot. For those who have followed our films Apocalypse, Revelation and Tribulation this is the fourth installment. In this one God is put on trial in the World Court for crimes against humanity – by the antichrist and by his own creation. It is a great script in which we were committed to letting the best arguments against God be made. We looked for the best arguments from the humanists, from other belief systems and from the most ardent skeptics. Then we set out to present the defense. As I read the script I see a film completely different from anything ever attempted before.

The backstory (the subplot) is also a good one. In that one we have a debate raging amongst the Christian underground as too how much physical force Christians should use in resisting evil. We also worked all week on negotiations for another film that will shoot, God willing, in January. All of this was happening in the middle of the actual filmmaking. The life of the first ever Christian film studio -- cool but exhausting.

Paul and I also worked with Nicole Hadley, who along with husband Steve are here documenting the making of the film for a picture/behind the scenes book called "The Making of Left Behind-The Movie". It is going to be a picture book that takes us through the entire story of this film but also gives a great behind the scenes glimpse into the world of movie making.

For those of you who don’t know the vision of Cloud Ten, Paul and I believe that the Lord has called us as pioneers in the field of Christian filmmaking. And we hope that we can serve as encouragement to hundreds and thousands of other Christian who would like to have an impact on our culture for the gospel through film. And to do that we want to document all of our success and failures, and shed some light on what is involved. That way the whole process might be less mysterious for them.

Paul and I believe that movies are the storytelling medium of our generation. They are the means through which culture and values are passed along. For too long we in the Christian community have pointed out the shortcoming of Hollywood without offering real viable alternatives. It is time to change that and that is what Cloud Ten is all about.

Finally, I’ll ask you all to please pray for me again. The cold and wet and lack of sleep all combined to bring a nasty cold back on with a vengeance. I kind of smile at it though. I like being in the middle of the battle and sense that there greater the battle the bigger plan the Lord has!

Pete

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