We’ve posted our newest New Year’s video so check it out here when you have a moment.  It’s called “Imagine” and it’s a quick video that poses the question, “Imagine what it would look like if we all…”  It’s pointed towards us all thinking about how our world would look if we all acted just a little bit more like Christ this coming year.  Hopefully you’ll love it and can use it in your ministry.

We’ve also put up our Freebie for the month.  Check it out here! A simple nativity scene that’s perfect for the Christmas season.  And don’t forget to shop around this month for all your media needs because everything is still 50% off!

Hey all. You’ll notice the site at www.eleven72.com is all new. We finally have the new site up and running. It’s awesome. We’re really pleased with it. But up until today I wasn’t able to blog because we were having a lot of trouble integrating the blog into the new site and somewhere in the process of moving it, I lost the ability to update it. But that’s all fixed now. For the time being, it’s embedded here in this eleven72 page, which means you have to scroll in this window within a window, which isn’t the best set up, but at least it’s back up.Thanks to all of you who helped make Christmas and New Years great seasons for eleven72. Our Christmas video, Breath of Heaven was a top 5 video at all the various distributors sites and our New Years video is currently the number one video on Sermon Spice and Worship House. We feel so blessed. Thank God and thank you :).

We’re looking forward to an amazing, exciting, surprising, fabulous 2008.

Storme out.

December is flying by so quickly… A lot of good things are happening for eleven72. Our Breath of Heaven video is currently the number 2 video on Worship House and the number 3 video on Sermon Spice, which is awesome. Our Peace on Earth, Just Ask, All Too Familiar and Christmas Presence videos are also selling well.

With Christmas almost here, I also wanted to point you to some of our New Years content that we’re excited about. We’ve got a lot of fun videos for New Years. Change is Possible is popular year round but great for New Years. Resolve is our most popular New Years video to date. And we have really high hopes for our latest New Years video, This Year. All of the videos can be viewed and downloaded on our site (click here). Check out This Year on YouTube and please feel free to leave comments, rate it, favorite it, love it:

Recently we’ve had the un-pleasure of mentally fighting back with potential customers of ours on the premise of price vs. value. This debate has been going on since I can remember, but we just got a comment from a pastor about our brand new New Year’s Video called This Year. He says it was a “Good message, well done, but at 50 cents per second, way to expensive.” It’s a high end, TV commercial style sermon illustration that is only 0:44 seconds long and we’re charging $20 (as we do with every sermon illustration). One of the big problems with this kind of thinking is we don’t spend any less time or money on something because it ends up being shorter. In other words, we spend roughly the same amount of money and invest the same amount of time on something whether it ends up being 30 seconds or five minutes (And I promise you all that we are not in this to get rich but to serve God… you can check out our books :). Our intent with “This Year” was to make a very tight, powerful video that could be used by pastors to set up a great message about the coming year. A tongue and cheek style simple short for New Years that pastors can take in a lot of different directions.This issue of Price vs. Value has become a big issue within the filmmaking community…the church filmmaking community that is. I personally see an enormous divide between the price of a product/service and the value of said product/service. Others I guess don’t see it that way. Chuck Brady, from the online publication, Bizcovering, says “In simple terms price is the same as affordability. It comes down to whether or not your prospect has the means to pay for your product or service. Value on the other hand comes down to whether or not your customer thinks your product is worth the money.”

So, if the folks on the price per second side of the isle are right, and it really does come down to value for the length of the product, then that means you MUST get more value for your $8.50 movie ticket to go see Transformers (run time of 2 hours and 15 minutes) than for your ticket to the 2005 Academy Award winning movie Crash (run time of only 1 hour and 47 minutes). Maybe you did like Transformers more, but was it because it was longer? Was Crash a worse movie or worth less at the ticket window because it was shorter?

Again, our heart in all of this is to serve God and His Church with our gifts. Not to gouge churches for money by overcharging for Sermon Illustrations. I know there are a lot of churches out there barely scraping by, but so are we, and we’re all in this together, right?

Love to hear what you think. Post it. Email it. Blog it.

New Years Videos (Ready to Serve!)

New Years is all about second, third, fourth or five hundredth chances. The beginning of the new year provides a great space for people to reflect on their lives and on the people they are and want to be. It is a time of Hope, Resolve and Change. Is it just a coincidence that we’ve got some brand new Countdowns and Sermon Illustration videos that are perfectly suited to those new year themes?

Check out the funny sermon illustration videos Change IS Possible and Resolve. And don’t miss the incredible time-lapse photography and inspirational scripture that is New Year’s Hope (Available as a Sermon Illustration or Countdown) on the New Years Tab.

Let us know what you think :).