Saturday, November 8, 2008

Ooh a new group of friends!

Hello all. I want to first thank Thom for inviting me and allowing me to join. This is super exciting.

My name is Gregory Gillis. I am currently a fifth year senior at Borromeo College Seminary and John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. I am graduating in December with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications. While JCU does not offer any real animation classes, I had to teach myself and make my own courses. While I not continuing in the seminary at this point, I hope to use everything I have learned and experienced to teach others.

I am currently in the process of working on things for getting into grad school or a job at some point. Until then, I will be working as a youth minister and computer technician and teach computer classes. The big project I am looking to be doing starting in December is actually how I stumbled onto this site.

A few seminarians encouraged me to start a web site and company doing religious education videos. We wanted it to be along the lines of "Adventures in Odyssey" (Focus on the Family) and "Veggie Tales" (Big Idea). Except we would maintain a purely Catholic stance in all of the messages. We would release 14 videos a year. One each month and a special at Christmas and Easter. Each video would be accompanied by games and activities as well as references and sources for teachers adn parents. A few people have already signed up to help out with translating the site into Spanish and supplying Spanish subtitles. This project is still a little ways off being a poor college student, but I plan to make it work at some point in the near future. I will post things on here hoping to get feedback whenever I can.

If anyone wishes to help, please let me know. I am unable to pay anyone at this point and it would be strictly for the fun of it, but I am being told this could hit big and we could make a large amount. At which point I could pay those who contributed while taking portions out for donations to Catholic Charities and the curch of course.

Thanks again for allowing me to join. Hopefully I will post more things when I get some fere time between classes and semianry formation.

~Gregory Gillis
GSquared Films
gsquaredfilms@gmail.com

3 comments:

Thom said...

Hi Greg! Glad to have you aboard! That sounds like a mighty ambitious project you have in mind! It's good to dream big.

I used to work at Big Idea and I still freelance for them from time to time. I've never seen the budgets firsthand but I do know that each episode takes 4+ months and many hundreds of thousands to make.

Just as a suggestion, maybe you could start with short little episodes on the website and build up from there?

Looking forward to your contributions to the blog.

Anonymous said...

I second Thom in that. It does take alot of time to produce quality animation. I would be more than willing to give it a shot. We can talk further about it through e-mail.

regina doman said...

Welcome Greg! Just let me know if you have any questions about plot and script: that's my area of expertise, such as it is. I'm working on a kids' show too, but it's stranded in development right now.