Preaching: Movie Style (Pt. 8)
Today is the last post in our series on movie series (other than a question I want to ask you tomorrow), and we’re talking about creative pieces within the service. Here’s a bunch of ideas:
Find the old “Let’s Go to the Movies” commercial (with the dancing candy and hot dogs) on the internet and make a sermon introduction video with it.
Get the movie “Gremlins” – there’s a scene where the Gremlins are seeing a movie, and destroying the theater. The outside of the theater has a “Now Playing” sign (I think “Snow White” is playing) – if you’ve got skills, change the sign to say, like, “Forefront: At the Movies.”
Do a top ten list. We do like “The Top Ten Signs You’re Watching a Bad Horror Movie” on a Sunday where we’re doing a horror movie, or “The Top Ten Least Popular Disney Movies” for a Disney movie, or “The Top Ten Signs The Movie You’re Watching Won’t Win an Academy Award” for a crappy movie. Go to Dave Letterman’s web site and in the top ten archive type “movie” into the search engine and you’ll get all kinds of help.
Do a movie quiz where you ask, “What did we learn from this movie?” For instance: What did we learn from The Sixth Sense? (1) A young boy can give a top notch acting performance, (b) Bruce Willis’ acting career is not over yet, or (3) If someone who sees dead people sees you, chances are you’re dead.
Show the movie’s trailer. This requires next to no skills. Most DVD’s have the trailer for the movie on them, or you can download it on the net.
Show a scene, or a montage of scenes, from the movie. This requires a little editing skills. Be careful though, we once showed a scene from Jerry Maguire that had “F*** you!” in the background. And that ain’t cool.
Do a parody of the movie. Think up a SNL/Mad TV kind of parody that you can do as a live sketch or a video.
Put someone into the scene. (This takes more editing skills.) We had one year where we had a guy who did a great Napoleon Dynamite and so we found the perfect scene in each movie, and put our Napoleon Dynamite into it … hilarity ensues. We’ve also just put a staff person into a scene, giving them funny lines based on the actual dialogue of the movie.
Use video questions from the game “Scene It” to do movie trivia with your congregation. Unfortunately, I don’t think you can pick and choose which questions from the game you want to do.
There you have it, enough creative ideas for a movie series to choke a horse. Finally we’re done with this series, hope it was helpful. Next time we’re on to something else. Until then, watch some reruns of Benson.
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