 So we're filming at the Goshen set in Utah that's owned by the church. This is the same set where they filmed the Bible videos. We're really honored to be here. It's a beautiful set and I think we're worthy of the type of video we're trying to produce celebrating the birth of the Savior. Okay, cut. Good job, man, good job. We're going to reset. We're doing good. The question that I had and maybe others had from the beginning is why did we need to create another version of the nativity. But the more we fleshed it out, the more that we saw the opportunity to explore some of the history and some of the context of the time in ways that we haven't seen before. Sometimes this story is told with a certain amount of pageantry and formality that I think in this production we're trying to get at the reality that these were real flesh and blood people that were living their real lives in a real place and that this event actually happened. That's become really important for me, these two people, Mary and Joseph, and see them as real people experience something extraordinary. Details that we have just a single line about in Luke 2 or in Matthew that felt like could be more than what's been represented on film up to this point. I think the Christ child got as close to first century reality as any film that I've ever seen. It's really a massive undertaking, but it's worth the effort because of the story we're telling. There's nothing that's been of more importance to the world than this gift that we celebrate at Christmas. Jose, whom have I eaten? Our approach into this nativity story was just trying to capture moments between Joseph and Mary and so that's how we started building it. It was these building blocks, what moments would be really important for us to see in ways that we perhaps haven't seen before that felt fresh or new in ways that would help us understand the story in a more meaningful way. These two actors genuinely connect and you're just immediately drawn in from that very first glance at her in the doorway, you just went, wow, this is great. This is what human life is all about, relationships, interrelationships and it was just beautiful to see the humanness come out of the story. We also wanted to tell Joseph's side of the story. Often he's a side character, sort of off in the shadows, but Joseph had a divine mandate. He had at least two heavenly visitations that we know of and he had a role to fill and he filled it and we wanted to bring that story to life in a way that hasn't been done before. I know any time we work on this everything revolves around my love for Mary, every step I take, every thought is inspired by her and what I can do to protect her and to help deliver this baby. I would just say play this just a little bit more like awkward. One of my favorite moments is when she's going into labor, she signals to Joseph, Joseph is panicking and trying to find some place they can go, Joseph goes to help her up and she shrugs him off for a little bit. He's really wanting to help her and he grabs her hand to take her, but she can't move, she can't go anywhere because she's experiencing a contraction in that moment, but as soon as that contraction is gone then they just have this window of time where they can make their way back into the cave for some privacy before another contraction hits her. I love that moment so much. I definitely tried to tap into who I felt Mary would have been, she was incredibly strong to have gone through this and be so young and to just accept what God was telling her was going to happen. You know that takes great bravery and strength. Mary's Lullaby wasn't in the original script, it was something that actually came up during the filming process. Mary's Lullaby was one of those things where sometimes you get on set and something happens or an idea comes or inspiration and guidance comes. We were in the middle of filming and one of our scholars was on set having a discussion with some other people about Mary. That she was really knowledgeable in the scriptures and knew the Old Testament. In Luke 1, the King James Version says that Mary said, as she uttered the Magnificat, but the translation is that Mary sang. So the idea just popped up, she should sing, why don't we have her sing like a mother would sing a Lullaby to a baby. As we discussed with the historians, the song that she would have sang would likely have been a Psalm. So the creative team went to the Bible and started going through Psalms, trying to find something that would be appropriate. Looking in my iPad and turning to Psalm 27.1, which said, the Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? It was a great scripture, it was in theme with what we were trying to do, the story that we were telling with this light coming into the world that felt very appropriate to the moment. And so we translated that into Hebrew. We went to the actress and told her that we had an idea. Unbeknownst to any of us, Brooklyn MacDaris, who played Mary, was a professional singer. She's a wonderful singer. She was very open to the idea. She went through, looked at a bunch of hebriistic music forms and actually improvised the melody. The next night when we came to shoot that scene was the first time any of us heard what she had come up with. And it was so sweet and so beautiful and so appropriate. What turned out to just be a spontaneous idea became, I think, a real emotional center point for the film. In the King James version of the Gospel of Luke, right after Jesus is born, the text says they laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn. For us in modern English, when we read the word inn, we're thinking of a hotel. And so the idea comes across in film often that they're frantically knocking on hotel doors, but there are no rooms in the hotel so they get turned out and all they can find is a cave outside of town for Mary to give birth. Now that word inn is actually a translation of the Greek word kataluma. That Greek word actually means something more like guest chamber. One thing that is nice about this script is that it goes past that traditional view and goes, I think, a little bit more accurately towards the scriptural account. There's nothing explicit in the text, but it's more likely that they went to a residence that they're familiar with, perhaps some extended family that lived in the area, and that they were welcomed into the home. So when we see Joseph and Mary enter this place, the main level is full, Joseph goes upstairs, that too is full. There's literally no room for them to really kind of bed and make themselves comfortable. The ancient world humans had very close contact with animals, so they go for area of privacy into the back area where the animals are kept. Because the stories of Jesus' birth are so different in the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew, Christians have long tried to figure out how to fit the two stories together. One of the things that I was very excited about when I first saw this script was that this portrayal of the birth of Jesus did not harmonize the accounts of Matthew and Luke, but instead separated out the events of Luke chapter 2, which is kind of the first act, and then it transitions over to Matthew chapter 2 as kind of a second act, so that rather than artificially blending them together in a harmony where we have Luke's shepherds and Matthew's wise men all together in the scene at the same time, which is often done in traditional films, that we separate those accounts out a little bit and so that we can get to know the story as Luke tells it first and then transition over to the story as Matthew tells it. One of the things that we explored in this film are how the shepherds react and who those shepherds are. In our research we learned shepherding, it wasn't just for men, it wasn't just for old men, and that was just something that we wanted to make sure we captured. And so we brought a girl in, one of our shepherds, and she ends up being one of the featured shepherds in the story. We had this wonderful moment where the shepherds come in, and this young shepherd girl who would have been about the same age as Mary, they just have this moment of connection, of realizing this togetherness and this the magic of this moment that just happened. So I really wanted to just tell the story visually and just rely on actions and reactions of people, and if there were dialogue just have it be very sparse. And because of that it got us thinking about maybe we could do this in another language. The language of the time would have been Aramaic, so that was a challenge because that's a dead language now, you know, who speaks that. But we found a scholar out of Minnesota that does translation work and still works with that ancient language that was able to help us. I'm David Calabro. I work at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library in Minnesota. Mostly I'm working with Joseph and Mary and with the wise men, the lead wise men and some of the extras. What I'm having them say varies depending on the situation, so Joseph and Mary have relatively speaking a lot of lines. I'm lucky enough to have a mother from Israel who spoke fluent Hebrew and spoke it in the house, and so I speak fluent Hebrew, and there is a lot of overlap between Hebrew and Aramaic, because Aramaic borrows from Hebrew and Arabic and some Greek, so incorporating that dialogue in that text of Aramaic was fairly easy for me, but not so much for others. By having it in Aramaic and not having subtitles on the bottom, it really does pull you into the story and it makes you pay closer attention to what's really happening, and along the way you're asking yourself a lot of questions but you're getting a lot of the answers as you're going along the journey. Kudos to the actors for doing as well as they have. For me, it took 15 years of college to learn this and they have three days, so. So Matthew chapter two actually doesn't give us a whole lot of detail about the wise men. It simply says that a group of people that it calls Magoi come from the east. The Greek word Magoi could be translated as magician or astrologer. It often is a word that's used to describe somebody who is a priest of another religion, of a non-Jewish religion. The tradition that there are three wise men comes from the fact that they offer the baby Jesus three gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh, but there's nothing in the story that tells us precisely how many wise men there were. When the wise men finally appear in Bethlehem, they are led somehow to the home in which Mary and Joseph are living and we don't know how old the baby or the infant Jesus was, but once the wise men find this home and they come to the child Jesus and present their gifts and then eventually they move on when Herod finds out about the birth of this child who some believe now is the Messiah, of course he issues a decree and the decree indicates that he has every child two years old and under slaughtered and that slight hint right there has suggested to many scholars that Jesus could have been as old as two years old when Herod issued his decree. We knew we wanted to tell a bigger story of the wise men and how they must have felt, you know, after however many years of waiting for this sign and seeing it and being committed traveling, who knows how far across their world to then what that experience would be to actually meet their savior face to face. I mean all we have in the scripture is that they fell down and worshiped him and you know, what does that really look like? When we're watching a film where we're trying to find characters that we relate to that we connect with so that we can experience the story and the wise men does that in this moment. We all kind of ask ourselves the same question what would we do if we were in the same position? Would we be able to speak? What would we say? How would we act? Daz's performance really does call that out of us and makes us imagine and makes us feel that moment together. The emotion was just all there and just his feeling and everything coming together. He's seen this divine king, this messiah and all his dreams, all his expectations are wrapped up in this little two-year-old boy. He'd been with King Herod. He was powerful. He was literally at the top of his game and then the contrast between that earthly king and this young boy, wow, must have been like that. We really wanted to give a gift to the world that testified that this happened to real people and that savior really was born in the world in fulfillment of ancient prophecy to come and bring light and ultimately bring salvation to the world and that's what we hope this gift will bring. We hope that people will use this video to flood the world with the story of Jesus Christ. This has the potential of being a Christmas tradition every single year to talk about and show and remember the birth of the Savior Jesus Christ.