Is your church’s media gas tank running on fumes? Who better to fill up than Media Fuel, based in Grand Rapids, MI. Media Fuel, an offshoot of Gorilla Pictures (www.gorilla-pictures.com), was founded in 2006 in response to the lack of quality church media. With more than 60 sermon illustrations, countdowns, and motion backgrounds so far, Media Fuel shows no signs of stopping. From having “Coffee with Jesus” to “Getting To Heaven,” their films cover a variety of topics with an edgier voice than that of many producers. We had the opportunity to talk with Eric Johnson (Owner/Executive Producer) and Scott Brookens (Producer) about their films, inspiration, and future plans.
COLLIDE: How did you get into creating and producing church media?
Media Fuel: To be honest, we kind of stumbled into the industry. In the beginning it was just the company’s founder (Johnson) experimenting with a few shorts in his spare time. In his intern days he had been a youth media director at a church and developed a library of shorts that played well in the sermon video arena. Later, he and a partner co-founded Gorilla Pictures, a film production company focused on developing commercial, feature-length, and documentary projects with a positive focus. It soon became evident that there was also a need for this sort of content in shorter form. This is why Media Fuel was born. It has always been our desire to create media that reflects what we believe. Media Fuel has given us a viable outlet to do this in short form. Now, we have more than 60 different products and are just about to launch the second version of our up-and-coming distribution website, ChurchFuel.com. It’s pretty exciting.
Why do you feel using media in church, especially video, is important in today’s culture?
Media is a part of our culture. We see and experience it every single day—why should church be an exception? The entire world understands the language of media. And we think that the best way to reach them is to speak their language. This is not always easy, as bridging the gap between culture and faith has been an ongoing problem for the church throughout history. One of our biggest challenges is to stay relevant without leaning too much to either side. We don’t want to "sanitize" tough content for the church, but we also have to be discerning of healthy moral boundaries. It would be easy to sell out completely and only create content that won’t ever ruffle any feathers, but that would be contrary to why we feel God has called us to this. After all, Jesus ruffled a few feathers every now and then.
Tell us about your relationship with your parent company, Gorilla Pictures, and why you felt the need to create a separate company solely dedicated to church media.
Gorilla Pictures is a production company that was started in 2004 by Eric Johnson and Eric Machiela (or "The Erics" as they are known around the Grand Rapids area). They love the medium that film provides to tell stories. Whether they are helping a non-profit convey its mission to the masses, filming a documentary on a social justice cause, or writing a feature-length script, they understand the importance of telling a story that is powerful, interesting, and relevant. That’s what they bring to the table when they produce anything. Media Fuel is built around those same ideas, but we tell specific stories for a specific audience: the Church. While we are committed to staying relevant and interesting, we also understand that we have a very defined audience (hence the reason for the company separation.)
Where do the ideas and inspiration for your videos come from?
Our inspiration comes from a lot of different places. Sometimes an idea will spark after listening to a great sermon or speaker, and sometimes it might come out of personal devotions. But often times it isn’t birthed in an incubated or religious experience. Much of our inspiration is formed as we try to apply our own personal faith to real life situations. Many of our ideas come to us as we seek direction from God in the areas that we don’t completely understand. In some cases it seems as though we benefit more from the actual process of creating our videos than the audience benefits from watching them.
Your film “True Change” has been especially popular due to the recent presidential election and struggling economy. How do you balance making timely videos with timeless ones?
It’s a tough choice. Making “True Change” was a risk and we knew it. We had no idea how it would fly, but we had a specific message that we wanted to get across and were determined to make it work. Sure, the video could have tanked and we could have been out some money, but at least we would have made a piece that we believe has a solid message. The most frustrating thing about that video was some of the comments that people made about it, accusing us of being biased. It was interesting to see the audience read their own personal political convictions into the message. In the end, those people missed the point entirely. I think it may have played into the video’s success. Either way, we just produce what we feel impassioned to produce, whether we see it as timeless or not. If we think it’s an important message that others can benefit from then we’ll do it. We try to be smart about it, but ultimately it comes down to just creating content that we hope is relevant.
What has been your favorite project thus far? Why?
My favorite project so far has been “Coffee With Jesus.” The main actor in that piece, Evan, is a lot of fun to work with and is really talented. Shooting that piece was a blast and it definitely did well on not only worshiphousemedia.com, but also Godtube. It was a fun project to work on and our audience seemed to enjoy it as well.
Can you tell us about any new projects you have up your sleeves?
Our next set of videos will be a spoof on the UPS whiteboard commercials. We have spent a lot of time getting this project prepped. It was put on hold for awhile, then picked back up, then put on hold again, and now we are actually going to be making it happen in the next few weeks. Keep your eyes open for that—it should be cool stuff! We have also been playing around with the new RED ONE digital cinema camera and have a piece coming out soon that we shot on that—it’s a pretty sweet camera! Maybe a little overkill for sermon illustration videos, but we figure why not?
For more information on the films of Media Fuel, visit www.churchfuel.com.