Drum Roll Please... Announcing "Hitler's Law"!

The Announcement



At long last, it is time to announce our latest project--"Hitler's Law"! It will be a 7-minute "tactical" short drama targeted at the current deplorable struggle between the German government and Christian parents over the control of their children's education. We hope to shoot during the month of August, 2008, and complete postproduction in time to submit it to the 2009 San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival.

The History

Hitler's National Socialist (Nazi) Party passed a series of "cultural purity" laws between 1937 and 1939. Among these were laws specifically mandating state-run public instruction for all children so as to prevent the formation of so-called "parallel societies". The whole purpose was to force a homogeneous culture in Germany. The Nazi policy-makers understood that to influence the next generation, they had to control the children.

The scary thing is that these laws did not quietly go away. Although the majority of the Nazis' policies were summarily ended with the unconditional surrender of the Reich in May 1945, many of these measures stayed on the books. Recently this particular law has been revived by the government as part of their program to stop the loss of their unique heritage. Christian homeschool families have been especially hard-hit. Many families have fled to Austria with only the clothes on their backs, mere hours ahead of the police, just as they did in Hitler's day. Homeschool parents have been fined, placed in prison, their property and children confiscated for trying to teach their children at home. One family has even had to flee Europe for Canada to escape the long arm of the government, which in the EU can even reach them outside of Germany's sovereign borders. The situation is very bad in Germany, and getting worse. We who enjoy freedom in the United States need to pray for our brethren in Germany, who still suffer under Hitler's Law.

You can read our news alert blog at http://hitlerslaw.blogspot.com/, and feel free to send news items to news@hitlerslaw.com.

The Film

Hitler's Law is the newest short project of Young Christian Studios. The story follows Herr & Frau Traugott, German parents in the summer of 1938 who must make a painful decision when the local SS officer demands their children be placed in the state schools. Will they cave to the officer's demands and place their children in the schools, possibly losing their hearts forever? Or will they flee in the night from a town and a house where their family has lived for two hundred years with the clothes on their backs and nothing else? They have only a few short hours to decide...

The film then makes the connection to the present day, where the same laws designed to promote a homogenous society in Nazi Germany are being used to force Christian parents to place their children in the state schools. We are hoping that this short film will wake up American Christians and homeschoolers to the terrible plight of their brethren in Germany and will help to bring an outcry of public opinion against Germany's restrictive education policies.

To complete this project, we need help in every area: funding, equipment, casting, costumes, locations, and post-production. If you live in the Triangle area of North Carolina or even if you don't, and are interested in assisting us with this project, please email us at producer@hitlerslaw.com.

We will have a production blog up soon, Lord willing. In the meanwhile, you can read the initial draft of the script at http://youngchristianstudios.com/hitlerslaw_r1.pdf. The upcoming R3 draft will include certain changes, such as conversion of the "Priest" character to Lutheran minister, but I can't get that draft up until I am able to get back into my laptop, which is having trouble.

Please pray for us, even if you can't help with this project. We have an extremely tight time schedule to shoot it in, and it's going to be a challenge. We believe it's a story that really needs to be told, but usually that means that there will be a struggle to complete it.



In His Service,
John Calvin Young
Writer/Director/Producer, Hitler's Law

Harvest Moon over the Lake

My brother Caleb and I got out with the camera tonight and shot some pretty pictures of the harvest moon's light on the lake. My favorite is one I shot with the hammock and the dock silhouetted against the light. I tweaked the RAW image a little to adjust the contrast, noise reduction, and sharpening, and changed the white balance slightly. I wish I could post more pictures, but I'm working on a tenuous Internet link at the moment and it took over a minute and a half to upload the single cropped .jpg.

More pictures, posts, (and the much-delayed announcement) later...

IHS,
John Calvin Young

Murphy's Law of Announcements

Murphy's Law: If anything can go wrong, it will.

Young's Corollary for Publicly Promoted Announcements: If a definite time for an announcement or a release is made, events will conspire to make it ludicrous or plainly impossible to try to meet the deadline.

Yes, I am here. I am not dead. I am not even dead tired. But there will be no announcement tonight. I registered the domain, I picked the images for the splash screen. I even opened Photoshop and began the layout. That's when my iffy-but-working AC power supply for my laptop decided to fail, apparently irreparably.

30 minutes of fiddling later--still not working. No problem! Web work is by definition portable--I'll just move over to one of the other computers. (BTW, you don't begin to appreciate something like Adobe Photoshop until you have had it and suddenly don't.) So I fired up the trusty-and-free GIMP to finish the job and suddenly it crashes. With an unexplainable error. I download and reinstall GTK+ and GIMP 2.4.6. Twice. With no better results.

Rather than attempting to do it with Microsoft Paint, I decided to have another go at fixing the laptop. 45 minutes, three rubber bands, a piece of aluminum foil and a Norton Anthology of American Literature later, the power blinks on!

Joyfully I power up the laptop, open PS, and am importing my images when it decides to quit. Going back once more to GIMP, I reinstall it again, witness it crash AGAIN, and seized by some kind of desperation, begin disabling any .dll in my system32 folder that comes up with an error message. Finally, at 11:58, I belatedly conclude that apparently I am not to get this announcement out before midnight.

That is the comfort of being a Calvinist--the Lord must have a purpose of some sort behind this--who knows, possibly forcing me to get some sleep so I can get up and get to work in the morning. So I shall. The announcement will come tomorrow or the next day when the Lord enables me to get my electronic world put back together. Apparently it is also time to buy a new AC adapter...

Until then, a teaser...
What occurred on July 6th, 1938 that would have repercussions for the next 70 years? Hint: it's been in the international news a lot lately.

In His Service,
John Calvin Young

Big Announcement Tomorrow!

Anticipate a BIG announcement tomorrow, July 7th, 2008. Today would be better, being the 70th anniversary of a certain extremely relevant event, but it's the Sabbath. So you'll just have to wait until tomorrow.

Hint: it's about a new project. It won't be a big one in budget, but anticipate larger-than-average ripples in the pond.

Until tomorrow...

In His Service,
John Calvin Young

Evening At The Lake

I took this photo while on vacation at Lake Wateree a couple of weeks ago. Subject is my brother Samuel fishing and our dog Martha waiting for the fish.

I love shooting RAW--it gives you such control over the final product. With the camera I was using, it would be very hard to get that picture under the right light conditions, so I actually shot it when it was a little lighter outdoors and adjusted it in post. It was not staged, though--they spent about 20 hours over the week fishing off the dock!

IHS,
John Calvin Young

Big Buck Bunny Released Online!

At long last, "Big Buck Bunny", the short-film animated result of the Peach Open Movie Project under the auspices of the Blender Foundation, has been released online. The Blender Foundation owns the source code and facilitates development of the open-source CG software package Blender. The Open Movie projects were designed to get a number of volunteer animators and filmmakers together to make a film specifically to showcase Blender's capabilities. If the capabilities or features are not present, they are typically developed and added during the project.

Although the organization of the project has been interesting, the quality of the finished project is the most intriguing point for me. Blender has come a long way--I've been using it since 2005, and its capabilities have expanded by leaps and bounds (no pun intended), especially in furs and particles, which are showcased in this film. This software has opened opportunities for many young animators who could not otherwise have made the step into professional-level animation. Some projects are even specifically using Blender for scalability, as it is freely available, such as The Filthy Spoon Project, modeled and designed entirely in Blender.

P.S.--The entire production files are also available, as well as DVDs for sale on the site. In the spirit of open-source software, though, the film is downloadable in up to 1080p resolution for free.

In other notes, the composer for the film, Jan Morgenstern, has released the whole score as a freely downloadable album.
Very interesting for those who might be scoring other short films. A full feature score is very interesting, but scoring a short film (like shooting one) is a rather different art.

Very, very interesting project. And I believe it was done with 7 lead animators. I think a project like this could very easily be done by one or another of the online groups, like CF.org for example.

In His Service,
John Calvin Young

Port Out Starboard Home

In the department of interesting movie trivia, I recently heard a possibly apocryphal story explaining both the origins of the word "posh" and the somewhat nonsensical lyrics of the "Posh, Posh" song in the much-loved film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (imdb). As the story goes, rich travelers sailing between Colonial India and Great Britain would pay extra for the priviledge of a cabin on the port side going out and the starboard coming home, as the peculiarities of the route would put the cabin in the shade for much of the Indian Ocean leg of the trip. Only the richest, most picky passengers could pay, however, so the modern definition of "posh" as "Smart, fashionable" with a subtle connotation of picky superiority followed from that original acronym of Port Out Starboard Home, supposedly printed on the higher-priced tickets. There seems to be a lack of concrete evidence for the practice, but the explanation certainly appeals to the imagination--and the rhyme.

This is livin', this is style
This is elegance by the mile

Oh the posh posh traveling life
The traveling life for me
First cabin and captain's table regal company
Whenever I'm bored I travel abroad
But ever so properly
Port out, starboard home
Posh with a capital P-O-S-H, posh

The hands that hold the scepters
Every head that holds a crown
They'll always give their all for me
They'll never let me down
I'm on my way to far away tah tah and toodle-oo
And fare thee well, and Bon Voyage arrivederci too

O the posh posh traveling life
The traveling life for me
First cabin and captain's table regal company
Pardon the dust of the upper crust
Fetch us a cup of tea
Port out, starboard home, posh with a capital P-O-S-H, posh

In every foreign strand I land the royal trumpets toot me
The royal welcome mat is out
They 21 gun salute me
But monarchies are constantly commanding me to call
Last month I miffed the Mufti but you can't oblige them all

Oh the posh posh traveling life, the traveling life for me
Oh rumpetly tumpety didy didy dee dee dee dee dee
Oh the posh posh traveling life, the traveling life for me
First cabin and captain's table regal company
When I'm at the helm the world's my realm and I do it stylishly
Port out, starboard home

Posh with a capital P-O-S-H
P-O-S-H, P-O-S-H...

(lyrics from http://www.lyrics-n-tunes.com/lyrics/chitty_posh.html)

Whether the story is historically valid or not it does explain the song beautifully. I enjoyed hearing this and just wanted to pass it on to you.

John Calvin Young