[ Disclaimer: one or two clips contain swearing - but not as much as Chris' second choice clip ]

{continue reading after the clips}

If you made it this far – well done!

Thanks to Steph & Nick who made the tea and coffee, and to those individuals who brought cakes to share – mmmm. Somehow the Multimedia room felt so much more spacious this evening – probably because David has had a major haircut and now has short, manageable hair! gasp! We also viewed the inspiration for a possible future Amicus activity – some were fascinated and amused, whilst some (Nicci) were disgusted. See for yourself – what do you think? Should we do it?

Ikea Breakfast: to celebrate the half term break in our usual style, we’ll be invading the Ikea restaurant on Tuesday morning for a tasty breakfast. Meet outside the doors downstairs at 9:30 – prompt!

Next Week: Sport – all night – come dressed appropriately, and don’t forget to bring your lucozade, and be prepared to work off the Ikea breakfast!

We split into two teams and were given a budget of £5 (pizza base provided) and a time limit of 25 minutes to get to Tesco, shop and get back.  One member of each team had to remain at the Church Centre, and would be blindfolded on their team’s return.  The team had to purchase ingredients which would enable them to create a pizza which was a portrait of one of their team members.  If that wasn’t hard enough – the blindfolded member would be assembling the pizza, still blindfolded, and under directions from the team.  Let the madness commence…

We witnessed the worst spreading the world has ever seen (Nick Bosdet)! And it’s on video, so there’s no denying it.  And frankly Chris was so good it was like he does this kind of thing all the time – a regular activity in the Buttenshaw house?  Also, Yolanda revealed that she thought Matt & Graham were a couple – nice.

During the course of the evening, the following joyous quotes were uttered:

‘careful, there’s grated cheese’ – Graham Dungate

‘now move it towards my voice’ – Steph Dungate

‘squeeze it like you mean it’ – David Putman

Some of the fun of the evening was captured in the photos below, the rest is on video and I hope I’ll manage to edit it soon.

Meanwhile, here’s the video of the big reveal, as Chris and Nick peeled off their blindfolds (after an hour!) and permanently scarred their retina. Keep watching Chris’ face as he realises the genius of his creation…

Aside from the fun, this is a huge week for the Dungates:

• Graham’s first week at Amicus this session (welcome back!)
• Steph’s 18th birthday at the weekend
• Matt passed his driving test at last (congratulations!!)

One or two others not having such a good week – ask no questions, but please pray for the group as a whole.

Next week: Favourite Movie Clips – bring along your favourite movie clip (on DVD, VHS or preferably YouTube) and tell us why you’ve shared it.

Last night we had a very successful final planning session for the Promise Auction, and even managed to record another classic video for the event.  It don’t want to speak too soon, but it looks like we’ve managed to jump over every hurdle and through every hoop (however pointless some might seem) and we’re almost there.  Rest well, you’ll need your stamina for Saturday!

If you weren’t there, you not only missed a classic quote from Simon (one we can’t publish on the website) but you missed out on some very exciting news too – now you’ll have to wait until Saturday {smirk}.  Once we’d finished the formal part of the evening we made our way through the ‘mist of sulking’ outside the multimedia room and headed to the Youth Hall.

I thought I’d leave you with three videos to make up for the lack of updates recently.

Typical Teenager? Ask your parents what they think ;o)

Parkour on a bike – simply amazing!!

Finally, a poem by John Goode entitled ‘My God‘:

Whilst watching this and thinking about the Promise Auction, these words really stuck out for me:

this is my God

the same God that I prayed to on my knees
spoke to Joseph in his dreams
parted the Red sea
raised Elijah among the stars
and lately I’ve been thanking them
for life’s hard times
because it’s in those times
that my lessons come
that my blessings come
I have a little more than a few
and a little less than some
but anything I have comes from nothing I’ve done

This Saturday: meet at the Church from 10am to set-up for the Promise Auction – dress code for the evening (not the day) is dark trousers or jeans, and we’ll provide a brightly coloured t-shirt.

Next Week: Pizza & Promise Auction Review

Yolanda was charged with organising the evening, and did a great job with the planning, and the execution was pretty good too. Although there were a number of long pauses as people thought through what they were going to do, it was really difficult to edit the evening down into a manageable but representative snippet. But here’s our episode – the best 12 minutes of video you’ll ever watch (maybe):

We closed with a whole uninterrupted hour in the Youth hall and enjoyed a few games of Skittleball, Unihoc and Footie. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that youth work is an easy life – it features many dangers. Not least of these is the real possibility of being kicked hard by one of your young people. This happened to me this week, thankfully though it was an accident during game play and not out of rage (Graham was well controlled tonight ;o) Click on the picture on the right to see my bruise in its full glory – this was taken five days after the event.

Just a couple of random things to finish with. How about this for a possible future Amicus activity?

At the end of the session I shared a few of the Top 278 Star Wars Lines Improved By Replacing A Word With “Pants”.  Here are a few my favourites:

• You are unwise to lower your pants
• The Force is strong in my pants
• In his pants you will find a new definition of pain and suffering
• I sense the conflict within you. Let go of your pants!
• I’ve just made a deal that will keep the Empire out of our pants forever
• Lock the door. And hope they don’t have pants
• Search your pants, you know it to be true

Without meaning to be too irreverent, I’d love to see us come up with the Top 20 Scriptures ‘Improved’ By Replacing A Word With ‘Pants’. Please add yours to the comments below and we’ll have a vote and publish the list in the a couple of weeks.

Next Week: Food Tasting & Pancakes (you need to bring stuff – click for full details)

At the end of the evening, before a game of Footie, there was a quick round of “blindfold drawing” and we watched a few truly classic Amicus videos.  Thanks to Yolanda for showing us the following great stop-motion animation video:

This Week: Blindfold Drawing with a twist.

The second team used a beach scene as their inspiration (the theory being that we have good enough weather at Camp to visit the beach – well, maybe sometimes):

The second group were apparently unaware that it was supposed to be a mosaic, and instead took more of a “Tony Hart” approach. The second challenge was to produce a Threadless T-Shirt design. The first team took a very literal approach:

Can you tell what it is yet? It’s a truly “threadless” t-shirt, complete with visible nipples and belly-button fluff. The second team split in two with Nick L and Graham sitting out with their pipes and slippers, whilst Yolanda and Nick Bosdet set to work creating Yolanda’s dream t-shirt:

The t-shirt features an iPod and a speech bubble which reads: “shuffled not stirred”. Nemo won the first challenge, and iPod won the second – not a bad result. [more photos available] Before devotions, we watched a couple of videos. The first, shared by Nick L, was entitled “Trunk Monkey” and was one he’d seen at work in the context of a training event for people in the motor trade

The second video is the new Glass and a Half Full production for Cadbury – truly bizarre:

The last video was produced to show to the 5 & 6 year olds from Drayton Park School who visited the Church as part of their RE curriculum. It is a series of photos of Amicus photos from the last few years – and my headache is testament to the fact that they enjoyed it – especially the very end:

For devotions Yolanda creatively got around her inability to speak in front of people without her head exploding, whilst also linking to the theme of the evening (not the content, but the style of delivery). Using a genius pad, she had written the devotional message on sheetsand tore them off in sequence:

Next Week: Planning for the next couple of months – please come along with at least two things in your head: your favourite activity we’ve done at Amicus already, and a great idea for a new activity.

First we needed to test the technology – a proper, but old, webcam.  So we had a quick think and came up with something suitable and set to work.  Here’s the result:

Our idea didn’t quite come off as we’d hoped, and sufferered from poor camera quality but it served as a proof of concept.   Onward…

Next we thought we’d try something we’d seen in one of the other videos which made us laugh out loud.  The biggest challenge in the limited space was to get everyone behind the camera and out of the shot (except the three actors).  With that achieved we set to work with a second camera to provide better quality and a different perspective.  Here’s the results of our efforts:

Whilst it still has the same image quality issues, it worked so well.  We’ve definitely decided that we’ll be using human actors in our next project.  We’ll be back to it in a couple of weeks when we’ll have had some time to think about what we’d like to go, and it will give us a chance to sort out the quality issues.  This week was such fun we can’t wait to get started.

The following video isn’t stop-motion, but I decided to include it here with the title: the most beautiful chocolate bunny massacre you will ever see:

If you have any links or videos you’d like to see included in the weekly Amicus update, let me know.

Next Week: Post-It Note Mosaic

We started the evening playing games on the Wii (as we’ve done before) and then tucked into refreshments. But the evening was not only billed as a Christmas Party – it also incorporated the long awaited Retro Amicus evening. During the early years of Amicus we videoed some of our favourite activities, and so we decided to dig up the old videos and watch them together. It’s a real joy that seven years after Amicus first started, many of our founding members are still with us as regulars. So we watched some of those early videos whilst cringing and laughing in equal measure. We’ll see if we can get the techie cogs working away and get some of the early video clips online for your viewing pleasure.

Simon has worked really hard since we finished filming our latest video project last week (1, 2, 3, 4) and so we were able to view the finished article.  We’d previously seen the out-takes which were great, but not a patch on the final thing.  Here it is in all its glory!

We closed the evening with a Christmas/Advent meditation: words by James Hawes; picture by Vladstudio; music by Ryuichi Sakamoto; and production by Ricky Rew.  Click through the meditation below:

We were also graced by a visit from Mark who came along to share the food and drink, and to present each member with a New Testament to commemorate the 125th Anniversary of The Boys’ Brigade.

Next Week: It’s Christmas!!

We return on 7th January 2009 with the Big Fat Amicus Quiz – this time organised by Nick Jones!

Merry Christmas!

[This update was almost entitled "I've come to wipe your nipples" but I feared that might be a little to racy for some.]

This week we continued producing our second Amicus film. We still have at least another weeks work beforeit is completed – but we’ll be having a rest next week. There are no photos to see, and not much more to report on than last week, except that Simon has produced an out-takes video to keep us going until the real thing is ready.

Thanks to Simon for the extra work he put in last night to ensure we had maximum time to spend on filming. Above and beyond…

As the only entry for last week’s Caption Competition, Nick Bosdet won a Snickers bar. If you come up with a funny/creative/off-the-wall caption next time – it could be you!

Well done to Yolanda for leading devotions for the first time. I really can’t remember what it was about because we were all laughing at her so much – is that bad?!

Next Week: Cake People

Last night, following the success of Filming – Part One, we rather predictably embarked on Filming – Part Two.  This involved some filming, a few bits of costume, amazing set-dressing, and the logistics of moving everyone in and out of the scene at the right time.  I still can’t share too much, but…

We started off with a quick run through of the script, with minimal actions, but much laughing.  Then we made the tea, by dressed the set and made “snow” {1, 2, 3} which would later be shaken by David.  Then onto a full pre dress rehersal with Simon ably directing, and people mostly following his instructions.  Cookies were eaten, lines were mimed (yeah, weird isn’t it) and there was a massive mess made on the floor of the multimedia room.  But well done to everyone for tidying up in double-quick time – pity all the polystyrene snow ended up in David’s hair.

There are a few pictures below and more in the gallery which will give you a flavour of what went on.

Secret Filming

I managed to take the following film which doesn’t give away too much, except the amount of fun we had tonight:

Caption Competition

The picture below is just crying out for the return of the Caption Competition. There will be a yummy prize next week for the caption I judge to be the funniest – leave your suggestion as a comment below – and be sure to leave your name and email address.

Next Week: Film Making – Part Three