This was the biggest Impact retreat ever. Over ten days, 1,500 freshmen attended one of three camp sessions at Latham Springs Baptist Encampment, and roughly 550 of them were at Alpha Session on August 8th through the 11th, which is the one I was there to film.
If you have not run into Impact before, it is an annual four day retreat for incoming freshmen at Texas A&M and Blinn College, and the whole point of it is to connect people who are about to move to a town where they know nobody with Christian students, local churches, and ministries around Bryan and College Station before classes start. Four days in August so that the first week of school is not the loneliest week of your life. That is the pitch, and it works.
As always, there were cheers, laughter, a spirit stick, and of course an epic slip and slide.
Camp Games And A Spirit Stick
A lot of what a retreat like this actually consists of, if you strip away everything else, is fifteen hundred eighteen year olds being handed a rope and told to pull. Tug of war, relays, camp games in grass that has been baked brown by a Texas August, and a spirit stick going to whichever group screams loudest.
It sounds like nothing written down. It is not nothing. Whenever you drop somebody into a group of strangers, competition is the fastest shortcut there is to knowing anybody’s name, and by day two nobody is standing at the edge of the field by themselves anymore.
Sessions And Worship
In between all of that, everybody packs into the meeting hall a few times a day, and the room fills up with hand painted banners and a band on the stage and about as much noise as a metal building can hold.
The Slip And Slide
You cannot talk about Impact without talking about the slip and slide, which is a long sheet of plastic laid down the side of a hill with an enormous amount of water and soap on it, and a line of people at the top that never gets any shorter.
It is also, and I say this as the guy with the camera, the single best thing to film at camp. People launch themselves down a hill face first. Nobody is thinking about the lens. You get real reactions all afternoon and you barely have to do anything except lie down in the grass and be willing to get wet.
Filmed In Three Days, Cut In One Night
Here is the part I am proud of. I filmed for the first three days of Alpha Session and then edited this entire video on the last night of camp, so that it could be shown to the people who are in it before they went home.
That turnaround changes how you shoot, and I want you to know it changes it for the better. You cannot go home with forty hours of footage and figure it out later, because there is no later, so you end up making decisions with the camera in your hands instead of at a desk two weeks afterward. You get the shot or you do not get it. You are already cutting in your head while you are filming, thinking about what goes next to what, and that is a genuinely good habit that is very hard to learn any other way.
The intro is the part I had the most fun with, and combining that with a solid musical score courtesy of T.I.C. really made the whole thing work.
Delta And Omega Are Next
Expect Impact’s Delta session video, which I filmed but did not edit, and the Omega video soon after that.
If you would like more comedy, check out Impact’s 2010 Rules Video.