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Camp film series · Competitors Camp 2025
“From my glory to His glory.”
The recap film + the whole media operation
An FCA project · produced as Regional Marketing Director, FCA Mid-Atlantic
The problem
Camp media has brutal physics. Roughly 1,200 athletes and 2,000 people on campus for one week. Every piece is due the same day for that night's program, the crew is all volunteers, and there is no do-over. Parents, donors, and FCA leadership only ever see what ships by the evening.
On top of that was the harder problem: the recap couldn't just be a highlight reel. It had to mean something.
How I ran it
I built and ran a daily media engine with a volunteer crew of about fifteen. It worked because the system was designed before anyone lifted a camera: who shoots what, when footage comes in, who owns each edit, when it locks. And I ran it to keep the crew invisible and the campers the heroes. They were tight enough as a team that when I had to step on stage for the camp photo, they put me up on the fifty-five-foot screen and roasted me.
The work · everything we made that week
The recap is the showpiece. It sat on top of a full week of finished pieces, every one delivered same day.
The showpiece
The Master Recap
The theme was glory, and the film carried one turn: from chasing my own glory to chasing God's. The first half is pure joy, every sport, every face. Then it goes quiet. The centerpiece is a palindrome poem we wrote custom for this: read forward it is a life spent on my glory, read in reverse it becomes a life spent on His. We wrote, designed, and animated the whole thing before we ever got to camp, captured only the voiceover on site, and kept it a secret. On the last morning we played it on the fifty-five-foot screen and rolled straight into live worship. One of my favorite moments from all my years on staff.
One per camp day
The Daily Hype Films
Every day opened with a hype film built to get the room fired up. Each version carried the same voiceover, a script adapted from FCA's decades-old Competitor's Creed, laid over fresh footage of that week's athletes and ending on a countdown to the day. The whole piece is built on one line: this is Competitors Camp.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday
The Daily Recaps
Each day got its own recap, built so every sport at camp got seen at least once across the week. Each was owned by a different videographer who went out, captured their sports, came back, and cut it before that night's session, the hardest deadline in the whole operation.
Underneath all of it
The Daily Engine
Multiple social posts every day, fifteen to twenty-five finished photos per photographer per night (over 1,200 by week's end), and five parent newsletters across the week, all on the same same-day clock.
Around camp
1,200
Athletes on campus
2,000
People that week
~15
Volunteer crew
1,200+
Finished photos
The recap couldn't just be a highlight reel. It had to mean something.
The result
After camp it went to the Competitors Camp Instagram and reached around forty thousand views. It went out to parents and donors, and multiple people reached for it in fundraising and recruiting afterward. Chris Rich, an FCA regional vice president who had been on staff more than a decade, said more than once that it was the best video he had seen inside FCA. And when FCA National reached out, their question wasn't how we shot it. Their own team could shoot it. What they wanted to know was how I built and led a volunteer crew to produce at that scale, every day, with no do-over.
What we delivered
A full week-long daily media engine (per-day intro films, daily recaps, social reels, 1,200-plus photos, parent newsletters) plus the master recap.
Have a week, a season, or a story that deserves more than a highlight reel?
Every film needs somewhere to land. The Storytelling System is the part that makes sure it does.