Vocation Boom, an organization based in Cathedral City, California, and Spirit Juice Studios, a production company in Chicago, are both focussed on creating quality productions to ensure youth are, in the words of Vocation Boom’s Jerry Usher, “getting the absolute best when it comes to the media they consume.”
Usher has 33 years in the media industry, working in various capacities in radio, including creating the popular Q&A radio show Catholic Answers Live in 1997 and hosting it from 2000-2009. While a seminarian in the early 1990s, Usher and a fellow student started a newsletter that encouraged vocations and sent it out to seminaries and individuals across the United States. From that experience, Usher says he “had a broader vision for promoting priestly vocations that included all the means of technology and media available.”
Usher decided not to pursue the priesthood, but his desire to promote a media vocation grew stronger. In 2009, he and a small creative team of lay people established the web site Vocation Boom. Usher works with other production companies to create high quality videos to promote vocations. He also provides links to videos created by other organizations.
One such company is Spirit Juice Studios. It was founded a little over six years ago to “serve the Catholic Church and the organizations that support it,” said co-founder Rob Kaczmark.
Kaczmark and his business partner Bernie Czerwinski started a radio show in 2005 to reach out to youth through music. They also did side projects for different groups that included graphic design, web design and videos. Kaczmark had gone to school for business marketing and, while he had no formal training in media, he always loved it, and began learning different aspects of media production.
After being approached by a group in Ireland looking to start a youth program and needing the media to do so, Kaczmark and Czerwinski decided to take a leap of faith and start Spirit Juice Studios in 2007. Kaczmark felt called not only to help this particular group, but he had “seen a greater need for… better promotional videos, films, web sites and graphic design” for Catholic groups. Kaczmark quit his full-time job and invested his savings, and they were able to begin producing videos for Catholic organizations.
Since then, Kaczmark and Czerwinski have gone on to work with Catholic organizations such as Catholic Vote and Word on Fire, as well as creating their own videos through their nonprofit company, Spirit Juice Films. One recent project, a co-production with Catholic company Outside da Box, is a short titled Zombies vs. Jesus that takes a unique look at the popular zombie genre, with an ironic twist at the end. This short emphasizes the importance of receiving the Eucharist, while still being entertaining and relevant to young people.
“We (Catholic media producers) have fallen very short of the mark in many areas to date,” said Usher.
He notes the Vatican II document Decree on the Means of Social Communication (Inter Mirifica) states that Catholic media must be “at least as good” as secular media.
“It’s difficult because obviously these big companies have a lot of money and it’s very easy for them to make things look good,” said Kaczmark.
Spirit Juice Studios sometimes works on a budget of about 10 per cent of what large companies are able to afford. For Vocation Boom, Usher says that it is important to use all of the state-of-the-art technology that is available “in order to compete with the messages the world is presenting us.”
According to Kaczmark, maintaining quality comparable to that of secular or commercial media is “a mixture of being critical of your own work, taking criticism, learning the newest and latest techniques and using the latest technology.” To reach youth, Spirit Juice Studios aims “to create our own style within that helps develop and separate us from other people that are out there,” said Kaczmark. An example is the new video they are working on for Spirit Juice Films, an episode of their web series Limit Break that will feature two Franciscan Friars who skateboard. This video will be “a mix between a skate video… and also the friars talking about their spiritual life.”
Both companies have won awards for their work. For a Palm Sunday video, Spirit Juice Studios picked up a Telly Award in 2012, a secular award ceremony in New York that honours non-broadcast productions and local productions. The company also won an award for Best Short Film at the John Paul II International Film Festival in November 2012. Vocation Boom was awarded the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ award for Best New Web Site and Best Vocation Web Site.
(Boston, 25 is a third-year drama student at the University of Calgary.)