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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

the great controversy

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News: The Record Keeper’s Now Dead

The Record Keeper release date was pushed back three times, and finally suspended April 2014.
The Record Keeper release date was pushed back three times, and finally suspended April 2014.

“There are no secrets.” And now there is no Record Keeper.

The Adventist News Network and other Adventist sources report today that the General Conference will not release The Record Keeper project: The Record Keeper is dead. The GC’s April 11 press release states that the project is “suspended” and “similar creative outreach projects” might be possible in future.

Back in January I wrote about efforts to save The Record Keeper and updated my post with Williams Costa’s statement that the GC was “not considering stepping away from the Record Keeper project.” Today’s announcement to the contrary will make it hard for church advocates to deny that Seventh-day Adventism struggles to support creativity in form and complexity in thought: our fundamentalism makes us a poor ally to art.

If we have a certainty bias that makes us hostile to new forms of thinking, seeing, and understanding, then we have a massive and possibly insurmountable challenge for those Adventists in each generation who want to drink deeply from theology and philosophy thanks to their love of literature and film. Story isn’t tidy and truth has many faces—when will we learn?

I feel sad today not just for Jason Satterlund, Garrett Caldwell, and the rest of the TRK team but also for the thousands of youth at Adventist colleges and academies who’ve already screened the entire series and were looking forward to sharing it with new viewers. I also think of those baptized during evangelistic screenings of TRK last year who are now seeing a church nervously disclaiming the tools that brought them into Adventism.

I am not concerned about the money that’s been spent. The Adventist denomination isn’t short on funds and didn’t waste them by funding or developing The Record Keeper. I am concerned about the message the GC is sending by abandoning this project, the creatives behind it, and the audiences that have already responded to it.

And yet the statement claims the GC’s “strong endorsement for creative outreach.” No, no.

That The Record Keeper has become the 21st Century’s Rise of the Minions is a loss for all of us.

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Seventh-day Adventist Creativity Takes a Hit: Save The Record Keeper

Jason Hill as Larus, an angel in The Record Keeper
Dennis Hill as Larus, an angel in The Record Keeper (2013)

UPDATE: The Record Keeper‘s official Facebook page has posted a statement from the General Conference Communications Director Williams Costa: The GC is “stepping back” from the series’ planned February 2014 release date; no new release date has been announced. Read the GC’s statement (Friday, January 24). See also this extended feature on The Record Keeper: the director Jason Satterlund and co-producer Garrett Caldwell discuss their motivations and the General Conference review process. Caldwell is quoted in the original post below.

ORIGINAL POST FOLLOWS:
The Record Keeper is one of the latest efforts by Adventist creatives to create, to tell a visual story, and to do so accessibly and effectively.

We hope to provide people with a fresh perspective on stories that may be familiar to some, but in a way they may never have thought of before. —Garrett Caldwell, executive producer and associate director of communication, General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

The 11-part web series

It has already won film festival awards and has been promoted by the Adventist News Network and other Adventist news sources.

After premiering in October 2013, release was then delayed until this February. I haven’t seen it yet. I want to.

But now it’s at risk of being shut down. The General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists owns the rights to the series and so is free to block its distribution before it starts or edit it into a shadow of itself.

Save The Record Keeper 

If you value the arts and support #Adventist creativity, encourage the General Conference to release this project so the youthful, visually discerning, and media savvy demographic it was designed for can see and share it with others. 

Williams Costa, executive director of the General Conference communications department, is collecting letters of support for The Record Keeper. Email him at: costaw@gc.adventist.org

Don’t let The Record Keeper become another Rise of the Minions, a promising visual project from the mid 2000s that never saw daylight due to lack of support. It was written by an Oakwood graduate and its trailer voiced by Wintley Phipps. That wasn’t enough.

Spread the word about The Record Keeper by sharing this post or any of the linked articles or Facebook pages about it.

Support creatives. Share quality media. Save The Record Keeper.