Glisson
A Hundred Years of Belonging
Year
2026
Scope
Full-service production
Blackmagic camera package
Scope
Multi-year production, capturing alumni interviews and event B-roll on site.
1 hero video, 2 event highlight videos for social, extensive b-roll library
The Client
Who They Are
Glisson Camp & Retreat Center has been shaping lives in the North Georgia mountains since 1925. Tucked in the forests surrounding Cane Creek Falls near Dahlonega, Glisson is a ministry of the North Georgia Conference of the United Methodist Church, where summer campers, retreat groups, and families have gathered for a century to grow closer to God and to one another. It is, by any honest measure, holy ground.
The loyalty Glisson inspires is something you have to witness to believe. People who attended as kids in the 1950s still tear up talking about it. Alumni pass the tradition on to their children and grandchildren. The mission has stayed consistent across 100 years: create experiences in creation and Christian community that transform, grow, and renew. For generations of campers, staff, and families across Georgia and beyond, Glisson is a place that made people who they are.
The Brief
They Asked...
Glisson’s 100th anniversary called for something worthy of the occasion. They needed a hero film that could hold a hundred years of stories and still feel personal, present, and alive: pulling voices from across the full span of the camp’s history, alumni who attended in the 1950s and 1960s alongside campers from the 2020s, woven into something cohesive. The film had to look backward with warmth and forward with purpose, and anchor an entire year of centennial celebrations as the definitive visual statement of what Glisson is and what it means to the people who love it.
our process
How We Did It
01 - Pre-Production
Concept, Script & Planning
The project began in late 2024 with a clear mandate and a genuinely open creative challenge: how do you tell a century of stories in a single film? We started by identifying the oldest surviving voices we could find: alumni who had attended Glisson in the 1950s and 1960s. These interviews came first, before the anniversary year had even officially begun, because we wanted that living history anchored into the project early.
From there, we built a production plan around Glisson’s centennial event calendar. Two alumni celebration events, one in April 2025 and one in November 2025, would serve as both standalone video projects and source material for the hero film. Planning also included a comprehensive effort to organize years of accumulated B-roll: footage we had captured across four seasons (2022–2025) was catalogued into an extensive searchable library, making it possible to pull the right visual for any moment in the editorial.
02 - Production
On Set & On Location
Production spanned two years and multiple shoot days at Glisson’s Dahlonega campus. The earliest interviews captured alumni reflecting on summers from seven decades prior, the 1950s and 1960s, giving the film a living connection to Glisson’s earliest era. At the April and November 2025 centennial celebration events, we returned to capture a new layer: alumni from across the full range of Glisson’s history, from the mid-twentieth century through the 2020s, gathered on the same trails and in the same chapel where their own stories had been shaped.
The discovery that changed everything came mid-project. The Glisson team found a roll of developed but never-before-seen 16mm film in a shed on the property. Nobody knew it existed. Once cleaned and scanned, the footage revealed camp life from the 1940s and 1950s. We sifted through that material frame by frame, pulling images that could bridge the oral histories of our interview subjects with the visual world they were describing. That archival footage became the emotional spine of the film, a window into Glisson’s past that nobody had looked through in living memory.
03 - Post-Production
Edit, Color & Deliver
The editorial challenge on a project like this is structural as much as creative. We were working with footage shot across multiple years, formats ranging from 16mm film to modern digital, and interview subjects spanning seven decades of Glisson history. The task was to build a film that felt cohesive. Not a greatest-hits reel or a nostalgic slideshow, but a genuine documentary that could hold the weight of a century and still move.
Justin Rogers cut the hero film to a final runtime of approximately nine minutes, weaving archival 16mm material against contemporary B-roll and layering alumni voices to build a through-line from Glisson’s founding era to today. The edit also incorporated interview footage captured at both centennial events, integrating the most resonant moments into the larger film while standing up independently as two shorter event highlight videos. Color work unified the visual language across formats, giving the archival material warmth and texture while keeping the modern footage grounded in Glisson’s mountain setting. The final hero film, along with both event highlights, was delivered for distribution via the Glisson website, social media, and promotional use.
Behind the Scenes Gallery
The Result
We Delivered…
The primary audience was Glisson’s broad alumni and donor community: people who had experienced camp firsthand, some many decades ago, along with the families and supporters who sustain it today. The film needed to live on the Glisson website as the anchor of the centennial presence, serve as a recruitment and fundraising tool, and still be the kind of thing alumni would share without being asked. It needed to make a lifelong camper feel seen and a first-time donor understand why Glisson is worth investing in.
3 yrs project span
17 interviews captured
9 min hero film runtime