By Santiago Kneeland
The writers team is fully engaged with their assignment!
The pace of the team has picked up and we are now meeting once a week. During these first meetings we’ve discussed many structural issues such as the story line, narrative, etc. The task is not easy and we’ve had to take many approaches in discussing these issues. Nevertheless we believe that we’re making progress and that the work in the end will prove to be of high quality and fully engaging.
One of the biggest challenges has been in structuring the seasons in a way that can present a full story without losing the detail of the narrative presented in The Urantia Book. We’ve concluded that the best way is to take it season per season, and engage deeper as the seasons progress. We would have a season that lays out crucial parts, as the starting point, and moves into deeper relationships and reflections as the season progresses, where we take the viewer to fully understand the divine and material nature of Jesus.
We’re very satisfied with the conclusions we are getting from the team. A multifaceted group of readers helps us analyze details and reach good decisions. We’re now building a full plotline of all the seasons that will help us pinpoint the crucial parts of his life, and set them up in the appropriate season or sequence.
We’re also addressing the key parts and elements that are not presented in the gospel and that will be new information for most of the audience. We’re being very cautious to present information that contradicts the pre-established story of Jesus, but at the same time sheds new light on the matter and puts it into better context. Unfortunately there’s no practical way to address these discrepancies, and we’ll have to hope for the best.
We’re focused on moving forward with the writers room, in order to have a workable storyline that can work for a project treatment. This means that we would have a full cinematic project, along with the calculation of all the details for production and distribution. This would be taken to production/distribution companies, or it can be developed like The Chosen project, which was crowdfunded.
Either way, we are now fully engaged with a production company from New Orleans, who really loves the project. They see great potential in this story of Jesus, which is different from any they had known before. They are coming in with a fresh eye, and have pointed out details we as readers might take for granted or oversee. Their fully engaged participation is a great indicative that this project is moving forward.
We hope to see concrete advances by the end of Q1 in this year, so that we can start to engage people outside The Urantia Book readership that might be interested in the project. We believe the project treatment of this story will be of great interest, not only to Urantia Book readers, but to anyone that wants to hear this account of the life of Jesus.
