I remember the moment quite well. We were in the last couple of days in 2019, and I’d just dropped my mum off at her flat (about 10 minutes drive from our house). A friend of mine, Ryan, was preaching the following Sunday on the story of the three kings (or wise men), and as I was driving home some ideas came to me for what might make a good sketch. I phoned Ryan when I got home and told him what I was thinking and he was happy for me to organise some people into acting it out. The video is at the bottom of this page, and the photo above.
Shortly after this the Covid pandemic hit the world and we went into lockdown. Churches had to find new ways of doing their services. Our church (Christ Church, Chilwell), like many others, put their services online. This proved to be the perfect opportunity for experimenting with doing sketches in film rather than live performances. At the end of 2020 we were even able to make over an hour long Christmas film called Not the Nine lessons and Carols of Christmas with people filming themselves (mostly on their phone cameras) and sending me the clips. So, below is a selection of what we have done since the beginning of 2020.
The complete collection of drama that was filmed or recorded on audio file can be found on our church drama group The Prophets Minor website here.
Easter 2024
Here is the first Easter film I have written and directed, The Day After You’re Gone. It’s looking at some of the discussions That may have happened between Jesus’ disciples on the Saturday after the first Good Friday and before the first Easter Sunday.
Christmas 2022
Here is the third Christmas film I wrote and directed, Advent Cottage. It’s the name of a house belonging to a friend of mine. This film was written primarily to be funny. Hopefully it succeeded! The intention was to make it look like it was a live performance of a radio show.
Christmas 2021
Here is the second Christmas film I wrote and directed, Mary & Joe. Fortunately the lockdown was over so that we were able to film almost everything in the church. When I wrote the script, I wanted it to come across as a play that any church with the necessary human resources would be able to put on…admitting that not many churches do have those kind of resources.
Winter/Spring/Summer 2021
Here are some random videos I wrote and filmed in 2021
Christmas 2020
Here is the first Christmas film I wrote and directed, Not the Nine Lessons and Carols of Christmas. To abide by the lockdown rules people had to film their own parts in their own homes and send me their film files to edit and put together.
Spring/Summer 2020
We were in lockdown due to Covid. Here are two examples of lockdown sketches.
February 2020
In February 2020 I wrote and filmed a series of monologues entitled The Gospel Monologues, and each monologue began with the words “Someone told me about Jesus…”.
January 2020
Here is the first sketch I wrote for Christ Church, Chilwell in January 2020. Looking back, I can see that the sketch lacked a key message, but it was a bit of fun and everyone seemed to enjoy it.