All About "Quest for Glory"
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The idea for "Quest for Glory" was born over the 2003 Christmas holidays. Two home-schooling Burns families spent a week creating its original storyline, hashing and re-hashing Civil War politics. That spring, as we continued to work on our script, we were excited to learn about Vision Forum's film festival. It provided the motivation necessary to make us strive for an excellent product.
Finding places to film required some ingenuity. Most of the movie was shot in our homes; a bedroom was converted into an 1860's office, the family room into a dining room, and our foyer was used as a front room, a doctor's office, and a West Point classroom! We even filmed one scene at a mansion in Abilene, Kansas on our way home from vacation. (We had taken our costumes with us just in case.)
Having no trained professionals on the camera crew, we had fun experimenting with camera angles and lighting. We discovered that for outdoor night scenes, you need a lot of light and car headlights covered with translucent wax paper are a good way to provide that light. To minimize shadows when filming indoors, we would collect most of the portable lighting in the house and bring it to the room where we were working. We were filming with two different cameras, both with different qualities of audio and video. This made color and sound balance a challenge when we were editing.
All the battle scenes were filmed in our backyard (and part of our neighbor's). The day we filmed the battle scenes was probably our most exciting day of filming. We invited over several of our home-schooling friends to fill the Union and Confederate ranks, where not only did brother fight against brother, but many brothers fought against themselves. Limited actors required some clever solutions.
The props we used were carefully constructed from items we found around home, or were scavenged from garage sales. The costumes were mostly homemade or renovated from garments purchased at a Good Will store. This kept the daughters, mothers, and grandmothers busy for hours in our makeshift "sweat shop." The boys especially enjoyed the time spent with their father in making a replica cannon, the frame of which was built from scratch, the wheels salvaged from an old carriage, and the barrel (a PVC pipe) was of our own design.
We want every film we produce to have a clear message. Quest for Glory shows that when a man seeks his own glory, he brings emptiness and destruction into his life, even as he acquires the glory he seeks. We hope this film can be an encouragement to other Christians and homeschoolers by delivering a clear message that honoring God with your life is the only way to true fulfillment.
If you are interested in purchasing a copy of "Quest for Glory: a Tale of the American Civil War," please click here for ordering information.
