Film Submission Completed.

Submission COMPLETE!

We're completely finished with this production. Six DVD's were sent to Vision Forum for distribution among the judges, final reviewing, and then we'll know whether the film is a finalist. As far as production for ILD, I'm still working on that. The DVD-face design is going a little slower than I expected, and I'm redesigning the cover. Fortunately, it shouldn't take me too long to remedy the situation.

Thank you all for your support and glowing encouragement! It has been wonderful. Here are some other things we sent to the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival.

A Lifetime of Childlike Faith: Production Letter.

In August of 2005, David Heustis and I were told, by my Parents, about a man named Leonard Knight. At first we thought he was nothing more than a glorified hermit, but we were far from understanding him. My Father suggested that during one of his business trips to California, I could tag along and video tape some interviews with Leonard. Not wanting to go unprepared, I did some reading about him, and found out that he had a remarkable story, and had done a remarkable thing. Because of this I went into the project more interest and preparation. On the night of January the 30th, 2006, I began filming.

I didn't know exactly what I was going to be encountering at the shoot, but I ended up having my audio dual rig fail within the first day, so I had record sound on my Sony VX2000, which has an irresolvable noise floor. However, we were able to solve most of this in post-production. One interesting aspect of filming at the mountain was the complete lack of electricity or running water. Salvation Mountain was fairly remote, and we had only four days to shoot, so we didn't feel driving back and forth would be wise economically or practically. We took a 12 volt inverter and powered our equipment off of the car. This ended up costing us a little more in gasoline, since we had to keep the chargers running. One obstacle I had not encountered was the lack of cooperation from Leonard at first. I had scripted out questions to get the answers I needed to tell his story more fully, but he didn't want to deal with "just another camera crew". On the last day we were there, he finally opened up and talked conversationally, but interviewing was against his rules. All I was allowed to do was be a friend, show some genuine interest, and he would tell his stories. In the end, we developed a strong friendship that made the entire trip, hectic and difficult as it was, very enjoyable and worth the time. In four days, I ended up with twelve hours of footage and a mild sunburn, both of which I brought back to Texas with me on the 4th of February.

When I got home, the footage went on the shelf while a lot of other more urgent tasks arose for us to take care of. On Thursday the 23rd of February, I got the footage to David, who captured and cataloged it all for quick reference. He ended up logging and organizing seven hours of good footage out of the twelve I had filmed. On the 24th of March, David brought his computer system over to my home, and we set them up to form our makeshift editing studio. We networked our systems using firewire, and then David installed a program called SyncBack on our system. Syncback is a freeware utility that allows for instant synchronization of two harddrives. David and I specifically bought matching drives for this project, and using SyncBack proved to be a valuable timesaver both for backup and transfer purposes. David and I were always up to date with the latest files from each other, and the project could be started on either computer to reference the files needed. This was useful when dealing with each other over the internet later, because if I made a change to a project file, he had all the rest of his files in exactly the same directories, so the programs never got confused. Also, SyncBack saved us in one situation where David accidentally erased all data from his computer system, including our project drive. Fortunately, he had just synced our computers a couple days prior to the crash, and we were safe.

We worked hard on the project for one month, but in April, we took a break, and in early May, casually resumed the project. Originally we had intended to be shooting a second film during the break, but a lot of different distractions got in the way, and we ended up deciding to just follow this project through to the end before starting another. The film was passed around to friends and critics one by one to see what they thought, and the story was structured into something fairly easy to follow. Eventually, the final draft was finished, and just in time. Our parents all flew to a business conference in Portland, Oregon on Wednesday, July the 12th, where the film was to be played the following Sunday. The film was received very well by the audience, but David and I continued to polish the render, cutting some of the longer shots, eliminating noise, fixing glitches in the color correction. We were very satisfied with the results of the project, except for one thing; the end montage. We didn't feel that it showed enough information, and it repeated a lot of shots already used earlier in the documentary. So, I ended up pulling that sequence apart and rebuilding it during the remaining few days before the deadline. On July 31'st, I finished it, and rendered it. For some reason, more errors were introduced into the render by the work on the montage, and they had to be corrected. The final DVD was rendered and burned on August the 1st.

We are grateful for this project, and what it has done for us. Not only has it been a tremendous learning experience as our first documentary film, but it's opened doors to other projects, for which we are very thankful.

John R Moore.

A Lifetime of Childlike Faith: Synopsis

The work of Leonard Knight has captured the interest of such greats as National Geographic, Ripley's Believe It or Not, and the Discovery Channel. A Lifetime of Childlike Faith tells the true story of the simple man behind Salvation Mountain, and how his faith has driven him to do the seemingly impossible without even the benefit of electricity or running water.

See yawl at San Antonio!