About

This blog is a mixture of things, partially an accompaniment to the Joyful Mourne Media project, and partially the rambling thoughts of a student. 

Joyful Mourne Media is a vocational film project started in 2013 that attempts to create art in response to God's glory. We believe that film is a fantastic method of storytelling, and so we want to tell the best story in the world - the Good News. If there are two things we are passionate about, it's filmmaking and Jesus, (he latter being the more important obviously) and so we combined the two to make our own ministry. Our main goals are to equip the church and to reach out to those outside the church. We do this through our 'media ministry', short videos designed as use along with sermons, or for mission, or maybe just for a good laugh. Basically, they're for you to use. We want these videos to be accessible for anyone to watch and use, and so we've made them available for free download.  

As well as these little videos, we also work on much bigger, full time projects, the ones we feel are big and artsy enough to call 'films' rather than 'videos'. These films delve much deeper into certain subjects and are what we mainly work on throughout the year. Look out for our debut film 'Unboxed', a documentary on healing, coming in Spring 2014. And if all that isn't interesting enough for you, we also dabble in photography occasionally.

All in all, we have one purpose, and that is to bring God glory through art. Being only human, we can never expect our work to be perfect. We make mistakes, we move on, we make better films. In the end, we're just trying to do what we feel we're called to do, to declare his glory among the nations, his marvellous works among all the peoples.

I, Jo, am the creative director behind Joyful Mourne Media, i.e. the one who makes all the stuff. A Northern Ireland native originally, I currently live in Edinburgh, Scotland, where I am studying for an honours degree in Photography & Film. I first picked up her grandfather's camera when I was 13 and soon discovered I had a real enthusiasm for the art. When I'm not hiding behind a camera lens, you can usually find me spending time with my friends and family, daydreaming somewhere on a beach or watching videos of red pandas on the internet. 

Avatar portrait by Christina Webber.