Fireproof, Sherwood Baptist Church’s Next Film

by Jim Kumorek

[ Editor’s note: A podcast of the interview with Stephen Kendrick is available at http://www.churchproduction.com/files/audio/kendrick.mp3 ]

Many of you would likely recognize the names of Stephen and Alex Kendrick. These two brothers are the heart, with Jesus being the soul, of Sherwood Productions, the film ministry of Sherwood Baptist Church of Albany, Georgia. Sherwood Productions’ prior releases include Flywheel (2003), and Facing the Giants, released nationally in 2006.

September 26th witnesses a new achievement by Sherwood Pictures—the release of Fireproof, opening nationally in over 800 theaters. With a $1,000,000 budget and the star power of Kirk Cameron, the Kendrick brothers, through God’s grace and blessings, have topped themselves again.

It’s fascinating to see the progression of events that took a church whose mission statement has been to reach the world from Albany, Georgia; to locally releasing their first film (Flywheel) that was picked up by Netflix and Blockbuster and distributed nationally on DVD; releasing their second film (Facing the Giants) that was intended to be another local film, but was picked up by Sony Pictures and distributed nationally; to now extending their partnership with Sony to release Fireproof, the story of a young couple facing marital difficulties and persevering through them to find genuine love for each other in a Christ-focused marriage.

Stephen Kendrick graciously spent some time with Church Production Magazine to discuss their new film.

CPM: With Fireproof poised to release next week on September 26th, the church must be pretty excited. What’s it like at Sherwood Baptist this week?
Kendrick: We’re doing good! We’re excited about the movie coming out, and just praying and trying to get our hearts right. Sherwood, right now, is spending this week in prayer, preparing for personal revival next week. We’re spending Sunday through Wednesday seeking the Lord for personal revival to make sure our hearts are right, and that will be good preparation too for the movie release, so that we’re living what we’re trying to preach.
CPM: What’s different in your approach with this film, vs. how you did Facing the Giants?
Kendrick: From Facing the Giants, taking the production budget up enabled us to hire ten film professionals instead of five, to help us operate the equipment. It’s still us writing, directing and producing; instead of 500 volunteers from our community, we had 1,200. And so, our volunteers have gone up; our professionals have gone up.
The budget money helped us to hire the Nashville String Machine to do the live orchestra score. We brought in some acting coaches to help our volunteer actors, and even Kirk Cameron had an acting coach on set with him. So, that took the acting up a little bit—we still have a long way to go, but we’ve come a long way.
As producer behind the scenes, I was killing myself during Facing the Giants to get stuff done, and wearing way too many hats. So, this time around, dividing and conquering was a big thing. We created a whole production office and production office team that helped organize a lot of things behind the scenes. We had a whole baby-sitting brigade, and new art department positions. We really worked at delegating things out and training people to equip them to do things that we were doing before, so we weren’t killing ourselves so much—and it really raised the quality in some areas.
We were more organized for this movie—we had the media and ministries across America on board from the get-go. Focus on the family, Family Life Today, AFR Radio—there were so many ministries involved watching us early on to support the production.
CPM: Did you add staff at the church to handle the movie work, or is it still primarily volunteer work after your regular church ministry work is done?
Kendrick: We brought in a few extra college students just to help us respond to email; after Facing the Giants, we started getting thousands of emails, and we just couldn’t keep up. We had emails ranging from people wanting to get involved, to those wanting to know how we did it, to people wanting to share stories of how Facing the Giants impacted their lives. But for the most part, it was still volunteer driven from our church, and us working two jobs [laughs].
CPM: Did you use the same professionals as in Facing the Giants, or were they new people?
Kendrick: We brought in the same core guys. David Nixon as assistant director; Bob Scott as director of photography; Rob Whitehurst who did sound for us; and we brought in some new guys as well to expand the team so we could operate more efficiently on the set. Keith Slade, who did lighting for Facing the Giants, was not available due to his commitments as a professor at Florida State University. Mike Smallwood took his place as Gaffer on this movie. Volunteers still filled the grip roles on the film.
CPM: Facing the Giants was filmed with one camera—was Fireproof done the same way?
Kendrick: 95% was a one-camera shoot; on the train wreck sequence and the house fire sequence we used a Panasonic AG-HVX200 to back up the Panasonic Varicam that was utilized as the primary camera for the movie. Postworks in New York did the color correction on the footage, and they matched the two cameras so well you can’t tell.
CPM: What other production gear made a difference in how you did this movie?
Kendrick: We used Apple’s new Apple ProRes 422 format, and dumped video direct from the camera to the computer instead of using tape. This enabled us to double the resolution from 100 megabits per second to 220 and to do edits on the fly; sometimes we had rough edits of a scene within ten minutes after shooting it. That was exciting, because we could see immediately what’s working; what’s not working; what we need to re-shoot…. It also kept the inspiration for the whole team going, because at the end of the day, we had dailies from that day, and people were just jazzed to see how it’s coming together.
CPM: On Facing the Giants, all the actors were local volunteers. With Fireproof, Kirk Cameron was a professional actor brought in. Were there any other professionals, or were the rest volunteers?
Kendrick: Erin Bethea, who played the leading lady, is also an equity actor in Orlando. She also grew up in our church, and she did a great job. However, when you ask about who was volunteers—they were all volunteers, including Kirk Cameron. Kirk said we didn’t have to pay him, so in lieu of pay we donated money to a ministry that he supports. He said he believed in this project so much that he wanted to join the rest of the volunteers to make it happen. It was great to work with him, because his primary goal in doing this movie was the same as ours—to do ministry. It wasn’t fame; it wasn’t making money—it was to advance the Kingdom.
CPM: How has Sony’s involvement affected how you do things?
Kendrick: It has been great, and not negatively impacted our doing what God’s called us to do. We’re still the writers, the producers, the directors, and control the content of the film; Sony is the distribution channel. They have never asked us to take anything out of our movies. They’ve been supportive and have offered great suggestions to improve the film. We firmly believe that the Lord led us to work with Sony on distribution.
CPM: Your budget for the first movie (Flywheel) was $20,000; for Facing the Giants it was $100,000; what was your budget for Fireproof?
Kendrick: Production budget was $500,000; post-production, which included the Nashville String Machine and color correction in New York at PostWorks, was another $500,000. The Lord provided what we needed, and we’re confident that the profits from the movie will reimburse that.
CPM: How many theaters are you opening in?
Kendrick: With Facing the Giants, we opened in 441 theaters. Fireproof will open in about 850 in 48 states.
CPM: How has the success of Facing the Giants affected you and Alex [Kendrick]?
Kendrick: We have never been a part of something that’s been this fruitful before. To get emails from missionaries in Brazil, and to hear from people that they saw Facing the Giants as the in-flight movie on a Turkish airline; soldiers in Iraq telling us how Facing the Giants has impacted them—we heard about a bunch of Chinese professors getting together and discussing faith and prayer, with one of them coming to Christ as a result. There’s been about 8,500 churches who have used Facing the Giants as an evangelistic outreach in their community. It’s so exciting to see, and when it’s happening week after week after week, we can only say “Lord, you have done more than we can ask or imagine, and we want to just keep serving You.”
There’s also a Godly fear that it’s brought here, that people are, like, “Let’s not screw up!” Let’s not get greedy; let’s not start relying on money rather than God; let’s not get prideful and start strutting, saying “we’re the church that made the movie….” No—we serve a mighty God, and He just happened to allow us to be used by Him. We just keep praying, “Lord, keep us usable, and be glorified through us, and continue to let You be our greatest delight—not making movies.”
It has been unifying for our church body. It has confirmed our pastor’s leadership, because he had been telling the church years beforehand that God has called us to reach the world from Albany, Georgia, and now they are seeing that happen.
CPM: How have the screenings been received?
Kendrick: The reviews we’ve been getting have been much higher than Facing the Giants. The secular test screenings that Sony had done gave it high marks; the person who ran the screenings commented that he had not seen an audience respond this well to a movie since E.T. in 1982.
CPM: Do you have anything you’d like to tell our readers about?
Kendrick: The thing that I’d like to communicate to people who are in production work in churches, or want to do movie-making work for the ministry, is that the blessing of the Lord is our greatest asset. He is the one who opened doors for us with Sony. He’s the one who enabled church members to act way beyond their own ability. If people saw what got cut out of the movie, compared to what got into the movie, it’s just phenomenal that God has enabled people who have never done any kind of acting before to do what they did. We strive to stay prayed up, unified, dedicate our projects to Him, remove anything from our movies that might displease the Lord or would cause a little one to stumble. We are very guarded; if God takes away his hand of blessing, then we will be doing ministry in the flesh. And in the end, it’s going to be harder to do it, it’s going to be unfruitful, and we’re going to get burned in the process.
I tell people to stop trying to copy Hollywood and sprinkle a little bit of Christianity on top. Flip it around and say, “God, what is your heartbeat?”
We try to pursue excellence. Limited by the volunteer help that we’ve got; limited by the budget money He’s provided, we, as an offering unto the Lord, are trying to give God our best, and leave the results up to Him. That’s all that we can do.

Church Production Magazine encourages you to support Fireproof by attending a showing at a local theater on opening weekend. What dictates how many theaters a film will ultimately be shown in, and how long it will run, is the results from opening weekend. We’ve seen the film, and it’s worth the support. Let’s stand with Sherwood Baptist, as the united body of Christ, and help it reach millions of lives for Christ.

For more details on how Sherwood Baptist Church produces their movies, see the article on Facing the Giants.

For more information on Fireproof, check out the following websites:

Movie trailers, clips, and movie resources : www.fireproofthemovie.com

Marriage resources: www.fireproofmymarriage.com

Church campaign and Bible Study resources : www.outreach.com

Jim Kumorek is the owner of Spreading Flames Media, providing video/media production and writing services to the A/V/L, technology, architectural and hospitality industries. He has led audio, video and lighting teams in churches as both staff and a volunteer for over 10 years. He can be contacted at james@spreadingflamesmedia.com.