Filmmaker looks to bring morality to big screen

By Hilary Funk

Daniel P. Johnson is a father, husband and filmmaker. In that order. His upstart production company, EyeLight Media, is based out of his east Montgomery home. Johnson wants to make films that incorporate faith and family, which is a media angle he thinks is all too rare.

EyeLight has one film to its credit so far, a documentary about home-schooling. He also has a feature film project in the works.

You might be in on it.

Track record

Johnson started his career at the Walt Disney Co. as a production assistant and moved up the ladder over three hard-working years to segment directing on internal projects.

"It was all good experience," he said. "Hands-on, Disney-production experience was invaluable."

Now, Johnson is married with four children. He has a career in information technology, and sees it as a way to support his family, but also as a means to get EyeLight off the ground. At this point, everything he does with filmmaking is a personal investment.

"The company has been my vision for 22 years," Johnson said. "But when you want to make your own movies, you have to demonstrate that you can create a viable product and develop your own track record in order to attract investors."

To get a track record, you have to make movies. To make movies, you have to have funding. To have funding, you usually need a track record. So it's a labor of love, and "baby steps," in Johnson's words, mixed with decades of dreaming and hard work.

Pioneers

"Hollywood has the money, but doesn't seem to have the morals," Johnson said. "It seems the Christian film industry has the message, but doesn't have the money. I believe the majority of Americans have deep morals and convictions, but there's not a Christian movie-making engine like Hollywood. There's not an alternative machine that can keep up with Hollywood yet. On the other hand, there are some Christian movie pioneers like the Christiano brothers. We would like to see EyeLight Media be one of those pioneers."

Johnson counts Sherwood Pictures, a movie-making ministry of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, GA, as one of the pioneers.

Sherwood made and released "Facing the Giants" in 2006. It is a Christian-themed feature film about an underdog high school football team. According to its Web site, Sherwood filmed the movie in about six weeks around Albany on rented equipment with an all-volunteer cast and crew. Samuel Goldwyn Pictures picked up the film for national distribution by luck: the filmmakers had applied for the rights to use two songs from Provident Music Group, which is a division of Sony BMG Music Entertainment. One thing just led to another.

Box Office Mojo reports that "Facing the Giants" cost $100,000 to make, and has grossed more than $10 million domestically.

The Approach

Johnson doesn't expect to follow Sherwood's exact footsteps, but that kind of success, for a small Christian film, bolsters his resolve to create art he can believe in.

"The filmmaking model that Hollywood uses costs millions of dollars, and a lot of that is labor costs," he said. "The approach we're trying is to involve community volunteers who have the skills necessary to participate in the creation of a feature film."

The feature film is in the story-development phase. Through the whole process of making the film, Johnson envisions people with various talents coming in at different stages. Some people are good with seeing shots, others are great editors. Some people can act, others can do hair and makeup. It's each community contribution leading to a product of which they can all be proud.

"We're seeing home-schooled, high school students who are generating 3-D graphics on their home computers," Johnson said. "A lot of them are doing little films of their own. They're shooting them, editing them, they have the passion to do it, and they'd love to participate in a bigger project like a feature film." He wants to involve them.

'Counterculture'

"Hollywood generates a ton of movies, and there's not a whole lot of Christian film available," Johnson said. " I think that a lot of the movies that are out there, while they might have a good message buried in there somewhere, the bulk of it is about things you don't want your family exposed to."

Objectionable content is not restricted to R-rated movies, or late-night television. Johnson said parents often stumble across material they see unfit for their children where they least expect it.

"That's something that my wife and I have chosen to keep our kids from," Johnson said. "Children are very impressionable. We feel like we need to bombard them with positive messages."

Johnson sees what pioneers like Sherwood Pictures are doing as creating a kind of "counterculture to Hollywood." That is where he would like to be working: changing a status quo from the inside, and providing family entertainment.

"There's a lot of subtle, non-Christian philosophies out there," Johnson said. "One of the things we'd like to do is make films that represent the true meaning of what it is to be a Christian."

That includes presenting positive role models, he said, especially "those that are trying to fashion their life according to Christian principals."

'It's in my blood'

While he is currently focused on developing the feature film, Johnson will continue to promote and distribute the home education documentary. It's his first make-or-break project, and comes with a large personal investment. More importantly to him, It spreads a message he hopes will inspire others who want to focus on their families the way he does.

"Ideally, in the future, I would be in a situation where my children can be in and around what I'm doing. And that's probably one of the facets of Dan -- that I want to be involved in my children's day-to-day life. That's one reason that we did this movie on home education. One of the beauties of home-schooling is that mom and dad can invest more time with their children and help them discover their unique gifts."

Right now, the feature film project looms large in Johnson's mind.

"It's in my blood," he said of filmmaking. "Ever since I was 14 years old, it's what I've wanted to do. We took three days of vacation time to go to Memphis to shoot this (home education) film. It has energized me to take on a feature film."

Reprinted by permission