Tony Blair Faith Foundation

The Tony Blair Faith Film Contest, Faith Shorts was full of adventures! It varied from last minute changes in the program to enjoying our daily breakfasts while looking over downtown London from the hotel.

The process of recording and filming took one full weekend. On the Saturday morning, Blair, Shayan, Sahba and myself, along with some other youth, got together. We started with some brain exercises and a workshop on the power of art. The next stage was to choose a backing track and write the lyrics to the song. We searched for a quotation from the Bahá'í Writings on the importance of faith and decided to base our lyrics around this. We agreed that the song should express how hopelessness can transform to hopefulness. Working around this theme, we each wrote four-line raps. We  recorded our parts by the end of the day, just in time to go to my birthday dinner.

The next day started bright and early. This was the filming day. With costumes picked out, we set out within the city of Guelph equipped with a whiteboard, speakers, an iPod and a camera. After we captured some solid video footage, we all went home and the editing began. Throughout the editing process, we would run into many challenges such as changing the verses to make the song more respectful and fitting. Eventually, I had multiple copies of the song but different versions! I finished the video the day before I was leaving for vacation in Germany, which was also right before the submission deadline.

On my first day in Germany, I found the opportunity to share the video with one of my relatives. My heart jumped into my throat when one of the verses was missing from the song. Apparently, I put the wrong version of the track into the video, and immediately called Sahba from Germany to run as fast as he could to my house. Over the phone, I walked him through the steps to adding the latest version of the track. With minutes to spare, the revised version was re-submitted. That was a very stressful day!

In early November, I received the news of our winning the musical category of the contest and by December me, my father and Sahba were off for London. Our first day in London had very few hours of sleep because I worked diligently on my speech. Tuesday was the big day. It started with a nice breakfast followed by important meetings to prepare me for the evening. During the ceremony when our video’s name was called for the overall winner, I had no idea what to think. I wrote a speech just in case however when I went up to the microphone, I forgot the whole thing and tried to salvage what I could from my memory.

Overall, this was an experience of a lifetime and I, again, would like to thank Mr.Tony Blair and the Faith Foundation for making this possible.

Nadim, Faith Shorts 2011 winner