My roommate and I are both members of a Texas A&M student group called Impact, which is a Christian retreat for incoming freshmen at Texas A&M and Blinn, and we spend our summer trying to convince a few thousand eighteen year olds that they should come. We decided that the best way to get the attention of the freshmen and actually get them to show up would be to make exciting video blogs. This is the first fruit of our labors.
Congratulations. You are watching it.
Why We Started Doing This
Here is the problem we are trying to solve. Impact is a four day retreat that happens before school starts, so every person we are talking to is someone who has not moved to College Station yet, does not know anybody here, and is getting mail from about forty different organizations all summer long telling them to sign up for things. A brochure is not going to cut through that. A brochure from a Christian student group is definitely not going to cut through that.
But a video where two guys in matching polos sit on a couch and act like idiots for five minutes might. That was the whole theory, anyway.
And I want you to know we have been preparing. I have been spending the last year praying for you guys and getting ready for you guys, and I have got this Impact polo that I have worn pretty much every single day, which means it smells bad. Waldo’s is in the trunk of his car. His reportedly smells like B.O. and fish. We are professionals.
12 Minutes Cut Down To 5
Neither of us wrote anything before we hit record, which is the honest reason this video exists in the shape that it does. We just turned the camera on and started talking, and we ended up with about twelve minutes of material, and then I sat down and cut it to just under five.
That ratio is the entire trick, and it is worth saying out loud whenever anybody asks me why their own videos feel slow. You are not trying to keep the good stuff. You are trying to throw out everything that is not the good stuff, and there is a lot more of the second thing than you think there is. Somewhere in the middle of filming this one you can hear me say on camera that I hope we cut a lot of this out. We cut a lot of it out!
The Song We Made Up On The Spot
About halfway through, Waldo announces that we have written the freshmen a little song. A little ditty. A golden oldie. This is news to me, because we had not written anything, and I say as much, and then we go get instruments anyway.
I put together Impact’s Third Video Blog: Something Epic as well, which covers the part I skipped over here.
So he ends up with an electric guitar and I end up holding a microphone and what follows is completely improvised on the spot, with no notes, no key, and no plan, and it goes on for roughly two minutes. It is about coming to Impact and finding a church and Jesus being awesome, in that order, mostly because those were the only three things either of us could think of while the camera was rolling.
It is not good! But it is sincere, and it is funny, and it is five hundred times more likely to get watched all the way through than anything we could have scripted.
450 Signed Up So Far
As of filming there are already about 450 of you guys registered, which Waldo cannot count to and I am not entirely sure I can either, and that is only a fraction of the number of people who will actually be at Impact by the time August rolls around. So if you are reading this and you have not signed up, know that a very large number of your future classmates already have.
How Do We Even End This
We did not know. You can hear us ask each other on camera how we are supposed to finish, and my answer, live, in the moment, is that I am just going to cut it to black and white at some point and it will be all epic and stuff.
That is exactly what happened. Come to Impact.
For more information visit Impact’s website. Music in this video is by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com.