This is a guest post from Mike & Rebecca Peacock, who create Tales from the Miracle Book.
Hubby and I were wondering how to take what we have been doing for 20 years in Primary Schools and churches to impact more people. Rather than needing to be in the location of a school or church, how could we get the story of Easter – the most exciting and dramatic story of all time- out there using the writing, storytelling and acting skills we’ve honed over these many years?
Well, we had begun to dabble in the area of film-making over the last 8 years and we wondered how to do a film version of Easter in a cost effective way without a cast of hundreds. Solution, film against green screen and use hubby as every character from Jesus to Judas to pharisee and Pilate! At some points there may be up to 30 Mike’s in one shot. After a few re-shoots (trying to get the eye-line right from character to character when there was no-one to speak to) we began the epic task of trying to piece the whole thing together.
The vimeo trailer that you’re welome to share is on https://vimeo.com/397655698
The project ended up being 11 short films and took us 6 months to complete (including writing resource packs for Key Stages 1 & 2 for each of the 11 short films). The vision was to take these films and teaching to mainstream Primary Schools for the teaching of RE.
However, with schools being closed due to the lock-down we put the material out there for free and we had tens of thousands of views with lots of churches and festivals like Spring Harvest streaming them for virtual church.
You can still watch these films over the next week. Simply sign up to www.talesfromthemiraclebook.co.uk and you can watch all 11 short films completely free! And watch that space for Christmas too!
About Tales for the Miracle Book
A brand-new, dynamic way of telling RE stories
Mike & Becky Peacock have been telling stories for years. The met many years ago as actors and founded Rhema Theatre Company in 2001. Since then they have written, produced & performed in hundreds of theatre productions, they’ve performed in thousands of schools and entertained countless numbers of children & adults. They’ve also delved into the world do film-making and been nominated for a number of awards.
With ‘Tales From The Miracle Book’ they are delighted to bring together the best of the material they have created over the past two decades into a new vibrant format for a new generation.
Since 2001, Rhema Theatre Company have been performing in primary schools throughout the UK. Over the years we have developed and created a style of story theatre, which has entranced and delighted hundreds of thousands of children and teachers alike.
“Tales from the Miracle Book” is a new online resource which Primary schools can subscribe to, and will be filled with a library of exciting filmed Bible stories.
Each episode is 4-5 minutes long and designed to be viewed individually or joined together as part of a whole.