Beyond the Mask & Veggie Tales

Director Chad Burns and his wife, Angela, met with Phil Vischer (Creator of Veggie Tales) last week in Chicago for lunch.

Phil has many years of experience creating Christian media content for families and it was a real privilege to sit down and hear from him. Phil had a lot of advice and a few connections to offer us.

Phil’s faith journey is similar to the journey traced by the hero in Beyond the Mask. Phil spent years thinking that his good works and fine efforts for the Lord would please God and earn favor. After a lot of hard lessons, Phil came to see that the Lord is more concerned with the orientation of our heart toward Him than the work of our hands. You can read a more about Phil’s journey and the Savior he loves in his auto-biography, Me, Myself, and Bob.

Phil’s timeless advice was simple: If you are worried or losing sleep about what you are doing for God… then maybe you aren’t doing it for God. Maybe you are doing it for you. The answer is not, “don’t worry so much.” It goes deeper. The answer is to lay aside our quest for personal fulfillment in our work and look to Christ for what only He can offer; the true satisfaction of our souls.

Please pray that we at Burns Family Studios will work hard as unto the Lord, and not for ourselves or other men.

Location Scouting

In any film, sets are a key element of the production design. However, with a period-action-thriller like Beyond the Mask, the importance of good sets (and the difficulty of finding or creating them!) increases exponentially.

This coming Thursday through Monday, Production Designer Nick Burns will be in Michigan with Producer Aaron Burns to conduct our second major location scout. The script calls for 70 unique sets, everything from the deck of a 1200 ton British East Indiaman to the interior of a tavern in colonial Philadelphia. The location team’s job is to find whole sets, or pieces of sets that can made to look like the locations that the script calls for. Places that can’t be found, or are prohibitively expensive or difficult to film in, must be built from the ground up, or created with CG.

On the list for scouting this trip are four historic villages in the greater Detroit area, two European styled mansions built around the turn of the last century, and several authentic colonial styled homes and farms in northern Oakland County. We’ll keep you updated with pictures as we go!