Greetings, I’m Jen McLendon, founder of Ceres Films. I’ve always had a passing interest in film and video but when I was in high school, everything was very…analog. Cameras were expensive and hard to come by and editing usually involved several VCRs. Upon graduation, life took me to the US Navy where I served for six years.
As I was getting out of the navy, I picked up a camcorder and shot some video of my shipmates. I got ahold of some editing software (because that became a thing since my days in high school) and I cut together a music video. I was hooked.
By day I was a college student trying to get through an engineering program. By night I was playing with my camera and cutting video. I began to quickly lose interest in engineering (it was hard, and my math skills had atrophied) and making movies consumed more of my time.
Eventually, I left the University of Washington and shifted to Shoreline Community College where I could take classes on digital filmmaking, screenwriting, and directing. Oh was that so much fun! I was in a classroom every day with people who wanted to make movies. Some wanted to act, others wanted to write, all of us wanted to create. We made short film after short film. We entered contests and made contests of our own.
After a few years, the economy shifted and many of us began to move on. Some to pursue filmmaking seriously in Hollywood, others to “real” jobs and start families. As for me, I took the “real” job route and landed in Nebraska as a nuclear power plant operator. Making all those films had racked up some debt and my freelancing wasn’t bringing in enough money to live (thanks economy).
Life took me away from film for a while. I would occasionally make a family film or short narrative piece here and there, but the everyday work of production disappeared into the muddiness of life. I got married and moved back to the Pacific Northwest and settled into a new routine as caretaker for a nephew with complex medical needs. To satiate my creative impulses, I turned to writing; something I didn’t need a crew to do.
As my nephew grew, he didn’t need me as much, so my writing became my focus. I wrote several novels and was about to pursue publication when COVID-19 hit. Everything changed overnight, literally! About a week into March 2020, it occurred to me that my skills in video production could be dusted off and used once again. My church had closed, as had most everything, and they needed a way to keep worship alive.
I got up in the middle of the night to email my paster to offer my services and she jumped at it. We rolled right into production. I began filming greetings, sermons, and prayers those first couple of weeks. Soon, worship grew to include recording music with our music director and filming more members of the worship team.
Within a few months, we converted the worship space into a sound stage. I brought my gear up to date with new lights, grip equipment, and sound gear. I was shooting several times a week and wrapped up in post-production. In addition to worship, I filmed several short films for special events. I was back in the production game, and I realized I had missed it terribly. While everyone was home in isolation, I was busier than I’d ever been before, coordinating schedules for shooting, audio recording, and editing.
2020 and the beginning of 2021 was a flurry of activity. By the end of June 2021, however, my church shifted from pre-recorded worship to live-streaming. I hadn’t live-streamed before (and neither had my church) but I was instrumental in getting the equipment setup for that. Suddenly, my busy schedule evaporated.
After the rush of production during the pandemic, I couldn’t go back to just writing. I needed to stay in video production and thus Ceres Films was born.
End Transmission.
