Saturday, April 23, 2011

Easter, update, & blog subscriptions

We hope everyone is having a wonderful Easter weekend, giving God the Glory for the Great things He has done!  As my 'Wellness' Professor said this week, this is the most important holiday of the year, as we remember that God sent His Son Jesus to die on the cross, taking all of our sin upon Himself, and then rising the third day, conquering death so that we could be with our true & perfect Lord forever, free of sin that separates us from the Father.  I hope that you all are enjoying the long weekend, celebrating that great love & sacrifice with loved ones of your own!

I know we're certainly grateful for those things, and for this little respite from all our end-of-year school stresses.  We finally got through our Sr. Portfolio Show (lots to share from that later). 

by Heather Foley
But there's still a lot to get done before the end of semester in about a week!  Keep praying for us there.

After that we'll be working on the production crew for our Cinema Prof's MBA thesis film till the end of May, then our lease is up, and we're done in Siloam Springs, AR.  We're looking for jobs & ready to move!  So if you know of any needs in the video production or even graphic design industry, please pass along our names, & let us know!  We will both have personal professional websites up by the end of the semester, too.  Andrew's is up now, but still rough, and mine is just 'under construction.'  But right now you can view several of the videos we've both worked on, at Andrew's Vimeo page.
And within the month check out either of our websites at:  AndrewArmstrongIII.com or KWightArmstrong.com

Our Blog Posts Strait to your Inbox
In the mean time, and on a different note, if you would like our new posts to be automatically sent to your e-mail inbox let me know, and we will add your e-mail address to the list that Blogger offers, to allow automatic updates of our blog when new posts are written.  At some point we'll put up a 'subscription' link on the side, but for now you can just 'follow' us in your blog reader, or remember to check us out periodically on your own, or let me know you want on that e-mail subscription list I can add you to.

Saturday, April 9, 2011

An overdue Satus Report

Just thought I'd write a little update, because something is probably better than nothing.

I really want to use this blog to keep family updated with us, hopefully on a pretty frequent basis.  But I get kinda stifled on writing because I want it to be just right and to have nice photos to make it worth looking at (everybody likes visuals, I know I do).  So I wait till I actually have the time, energy, recourses to sit and write complete, coherent, and attractive posts...all the while time flys by and tons of stuff gets bypassed over without ever reporting it to you guys.
     Most of it I blame on our crazy ever-changing schedules.  We do so many things outside of classes that we never actually know when we'll have time to be home. It's pretty difficult having such a busy unstable schedule for the last 3 years we've been at JBU.
     I'm so bad at updating, you probably don't even know what those things are that keep us so occupied.  They are classes, workstudy hours (mine are in the Digital Media equipment lab), we both work as Student Producers for video web content under the JBU Campus Communications dpt. (checkout the homepage videos & panoramic virtual tour at jbu.edu), we have COAST stuff which is sometimes SFS stuff (Student Filmmakers Society), various student video projects we work on or help others with, and for most of this semester til last month I spent all my free time coordinating the Arties award show as event planner, plus lots of other smaller things as they come.

Last weekend Andrew had the great opportunity to go to Roswell/Riodoso, NM with our boss Jacob, his wife Laura, and photographer Mark Jackson.  Jacob is a JBU Alumnus Producer who made Coyote County Loser, and is in pre-production for his next feature, CAMP.  Inbetween, he's directing a documentary about a band in New Mexico.  Mark is the DP for that, and they invited Andrew along as a Camera Assist for their 1st days of principle photography (shooting).  They were gone from Thursday till Monday morning, and I hear it was a great trip, but I know they all worked really hard, and were super tired after the long late night drive home.
     It was kinda hard on me, having never actually been away from eachother that long since we've been married.  He once went on a 2 week trip touring with Mercy Me when we were dating, but it's been awhile.  We're grateful he had the opportunity, and hopefully if there's more travel in the future it will be after we've settled somewhere (soon) where we have a church community and I can have made friends and have a support net of other people around.  Though of course we may both get to do some traveling for our jobs in film...I'm just not very good at doing it separately yet.

On the school front I will be graduating this May, finally; Yay!  But since AR has different course requirements than what I already fulfilled in TX, I still have to take the CLEP to fulfill Western Civs I & II in the next couple weeks.  I'm already studying up, but you guys can pray for me on that.
     Andrew still has just a few more electives to finish over summer to get his degree, but we will be celebrating together in May anyway!
     Next month we both look forward to working on Sned's (our Cinema Professor's) MFA film production, Carlisle's Secret, which will finish shooting on Andrew's birthday.  Then a few days later our lease will be up, and hopefully we'll be outta here!  And back to Texas... or wherever God brings the next job offer from.
     Right now we're gearing up for our Sr. Portfolio Show next Friday (15th), and so we're getting all our demo reel, résumé, & business card materials made up for job hunting.  We hope to talk to some of our old Dallas contacts and get onto some productions there soon.  Though we're open to work anywhere God may take us to.  Honestly I just want to get out of school, and start work so we can get into the careers we love, have a place to live, a stable schedule that will allow us to cook actual meals & be healthy, time to blog and edit/upload all the photos we take, and allow us to get our graduation-puppy we've been talking about since we got married!

It's all coming so fast, and there are no assurances; but something's going to happen, we'll end up somewhere, and we can be sure of God's love, grace, and provision in leading us in His will for our life.  Can't wait to see what He's got up His sleeve.