Our DVD is now Available
We’re thrilled to announce the public release of our film! As you know, we have had many setbacks (from losing all the footage due to equipment failure after having our hard drive examined by Israeli security to waiting on stock footage to be released to us for public broadcast.) After many months, we’re happy to have the film complete so we can share our experience in Bethlehem with you.

The video is available now on YouTube. You can see it here. We pray you will forward it on to your friends and family to help us tell our story.

Our hope is to show the film in as many churches and bible study classes as possible. Please contact us if you’d like to help us show the film in your church. Our goal is for people to catch the vision and join us in Bethlehem, or to help us make gift delivery possible by contributing to the project. Again, if you think you can help show the film in your church or bible study, please contact us.

Finally, those of you who supported us last year have received copies of the DVD. If you donated last year, please give USPS some time to deliver the DVD to you. If you do not receive it by next week, please let us know so we can send you a copy.

BCP Family Picnic
Mark your calendars, because we’ll be having a picnic on November 22nd at TY park in Hollywood, FL! Some very nice folks have donated burgers and chicken to us, and we also have someone who has volunteered their time to run organized games for the kids.

We’ll be having a bounce house and some prizes, so be sure to come and have a good time with us and meet some of the other folks who have made the project possible

We’re asking folks to donate $10 per adult (ages 10&up) and $5 per child (2-9). You can sign-up online here. Please sign-up ahead of time so we can estimate the amount of food we’ll need.

All the funds raised will go to purchasing Christmas gifts.

More information and other events can be found on our events page.

BCP 2008 Team
Last but not least, we are getting ready to go back to Bethlehem in December. We’ll be in Bethlehem from December 6th through the 13th.

We have a team of 13 people from 3 States. We’re very excited to see what God will be doing this year. We pray you will support us again with your prayers and giving. We can’t do this project without you.

Please pray for our safety and for God’s will to be done during the project. We’ll be blogging daily and uploading pictures, so be sure to check your email and our website. Ali will also be updating his facebook profile with updates along the way (when possible). We’ll also be updating Twitter. Here’s the link to our twitter page.

The best is yet to come!

Hello everyone, we have lots of new faces signed up to the blog and quite a bit has been happening in the last two months.

First for some great news: we are now an official 501(c)(3) non-profit organization! The lawyer who helped us with the process said: “This is nothing short of a miracle, both the speed at which this occurred and the relative ease of obtaining it…” We are very happy to be an official non-profit and to have the IRS requirements process behind us. We too were amazed with how quickly we were able to receive non-profit status. Thanks be to God and to all of you who have been praying for us.

Beyond the IRS paperwork, most of our time and energy has been about producing the film and presenting it to potential broadcasters. The finished piece is less than 7-minutes long, but each minute has had hours, and hours, of work behind it.

In March we attended the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Nashville and showed early versions of the movie to potential broadcasters from around the world (everywhere from Australia, the UK, Romania, the Middle East, South Africa, the Netherlands and on and on.) We have quite a bit of interest from broadcasters and are looking forward to wrapping up all the loose ends on the film project and seeing it before audiences.

When will the film be ready, you ask? All the footage is complete, the music is finished and all that remains is finishing up the credits, working on titling and subtitles, audio and color correction, creating the DVD menu, packaging the film, getting DVDs produced and mailed, and putting and the video up on YouTube. Just a few loose ends…more or less…please pray for this process to go smoothly.

Why is this taking so long you may wonder? In the last entry we wrote about the troubles we had with Israeli security disassembling hard drives, losing footage and having to send the drives to data recovery.

After receiving the footage and going through many edits and finalizing the voice-overs, one item remained: securing the rights to some stock footage we utilized. Those of you who have had the chance to see early versions of the film know we have some footage showing the cycle of violence in the region. Using that footage requires purchasing the rights, but before we could do that we needed to research where the footage came from and then negotiate pricing. This alone took several weeks but fortunately, we now have the necessary rights (thanks to a grant we received specifically for the film project).

Once we secured the rights we then shipped the video files from the UK to Iowa (the hard drive arrived in Iowa today!) and now we are waiting to start the final phase of post-production.

The year will accelerate from here in as we gear up for heading to Bethlehem in December. It’s almost unbelievable that 6 months have passed since the team returned from Bethlehem and it’s almost unbelievable that we have just about 7 months to go before returning.

We will soon be publishing the dates for BCP 2008. Be sure to contact us if you’re thinking of joining us this year.

Finally, we have a need for some web development work. If you have the necessary skills and are willing to dedicate 2 hours per night for two-to-three weeks, please drop us a line.

Be blessed and keep us in your prayers…The best is yet to come.

The trailer for the project is done and it’s up on YouTube! We’re very excited about it and are looking forward to getting the word out. We want others to catch the vision as we get closer to Christmas. Now is the time! Help us make it a reality.

Our favorite line of the trailer is the closing sentence. It sums up the entire project. You’ll just have to watch it to see what we mean.

Help us by telling us what you think and getting the word out there by forwarding the trailer on. Also, comment on this entry and tell us what you think of the final cut.

**Note** This entry has been edited. The video has been held back and will be release soon…

The video trailer for the Bethlehem Christmas Project has been months in the making. I haven’t talked too much about it in the blog, but I have been discussing it offline with many of you for some time.

The trailer was filmed in the West Bank and Israel, and was edited in London. It includes footage of some of the Israeli and Palestinian team members, as well as, footage of Dr. Salim Munayer of Musalaha

So, Basil (the director for the documentary) is in Nazareth to begin filming the trailer for the project. We’ve been preparing for a while and he’s finally off. I hadn’t heard from him in a couple of days and was wondering how things were going.

Yesterday, I got an email from him that gave me a good laugh. I asked him if I could share it and he said “yes”. Now, before I paste it in, let me first set the stage.

Arriving in Tel Aviv is not simply a matter of getting off the plane and picking up your luggage. I was interviewed by four sets of people during my trip last year. I was treated well but was thoroughly questioned. Basil and his cameraman just arrived a couple of days ago. Below is the email from Basil about their airport experience.

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I am in Nazareth now after two days of no sleep.

We had an interesting interrogation at the airport. After an hour of asking my cameraman hundreds of questions, I finally produced my business card and said that they should check on me and see that i am legit. So they did and after 5min they came back and said: “Oh, you are the one who made the Ping Pong film, we loved it, the whole office is laughing watching it. You can go now.”

I should have produced that card much earlier!

They where very interested why my cameraman was named Adolf, and why he was Egyptian with a brand new Luxembourgian passport. So, he did look suspicious. They where printing off papers about him, and filing it. so I suppose he now has his own file at the Mossad.

They didn’t give me any trouble, I already have a file there!

————–

Somewhere in Tel Aviv someone is saying: “I interrogated the Ping Pong guy today”. Pray for Basil and Adolf as they go about getting all the footage they need. They still have checkpoints and walls to go through…

Tomorrow I’m going to add some upcoming events on the site. We have quite a bit coming up next month…

It has been a busy, busy, month! Stressful, and full of things to do, but we’re making headway. Stay tuned to the website, we’re going to have a video blog soon. We’re also planning on going on facebook.

So, what’s been happening? We’re incorporated and now have a board of directors. We’re about to finish up the non-profit paperwork and once that’s in we’ll be able to activate the online donations.

I went through a brief burnout period and Jenni forced me to take three days off away from the computer and cell phone. Taking time off gave me the opportunity to look back and have an appreciation for what’s been happening.

In the past few months we were able to create a web presence, get on NPR, assemble a board of directors, and get incorporated (not to mention have a filmmaker sign on). Speaking of which…

I’ve spent the past week working with Basil getting the ball rolling on the documentary. We plan on having a video intro for the project soon to help us introduce the project. I’ll post it once it’s done.

We have a hi-def camera that we’ll be using to capture happenings. The video blog is going to be pretty exciting. Stay tuned!