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News Release
Contact: Jeffrey Chown, NIU Department of Communication
(815) 753-6989
November 18, 2003
Grad student documentary wins top award at film festival
DeKalb, Ill.--Another graduate student documentary from NIU's Department of Communication has won a top award at a major film festival.
Paul Butler's film, "Save Them!: The Life of Paul Rader," was voted the best documentary at the fourth annual What You See if What You Get (WYSIWYG) film festival in San Francisco. The festival specializes in Christian-themed film and video material and features four days of screenings of a variety of media.
Butler's film, created for his master's degree thesis, is a 60-minute biography of Paul Rader, who was arguably the first evangelist to take to the radio waves. In the 1920s, Rader laid down a style of reaching out to the masses through the technology of radio that influenced all Christian broadcasters following him.
Butler did extensive research on Rader, uncovering rarely seen photographs and unreleased audio recordings, and wove together a Ken Burns-style presentation of the broadcaster's life and work.
A rough cut was screened to an enthusiastic audience at last spring's "Reality Bytes" film festival at NIU. However, this was the first festival that the post-defense thesis film had been submitted.
Butler worked with his thesis director, Jeffrey Chown, as well as Laura Vazquez and John Butler in crafting the project, which took 18-months of intensive work. Paul is now an assistant professor of communication at Moody Bible Institute, where he teaches audio production.
Moody will hold a public screening at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 25, at its Alumni Auditorium. Butler attended the San Francisco festival and had the chance to talk with a number of media distributors about future dissemination of the film. Butler intends to make the Paul Rader story a pilot for a series of four more documentaries on Christian radio pioneers.
Contact Info:
Jeffrey Chown
Department of Communication
Northern Illinois University
815-753-6989
jchown@niu.edu
Paul Butler
paul.butler@moody.edu
What You See is What You Get Film Festival
www.wysiwygusa.com
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