Are you one of the 25ish million people who have seen one of these posts? No? Let's set the stage. How do you talk about Jesus on TikTok and Instagram without ending up on the Christian side of the algorithm? Our idea was to open up the conversation about Jesus to include real voices from every perspective we could find. The first way we did that was by asking strangers for their hot takes on Jesus:
This whole Hot Takes project was effectively a crash course in TikTok journalism: 6 shoots days, over 150 interviews with strangers, and endless refining of what questions we ask, how we word them, what order we ask them in to get the best answers. And then a beast of an edit process to create over 20 unique videos for social. CW: Me; AD: Kylie Paz; Initial seed of this idea: Roscoe McGee
Jesus taught people to ask for forgiveness and own up to their mistakes. He also encouraged and honored people when they were particularly kind, generous, patient, etc. We saw an opportunity to bring some of that into the real world by giving strangers an opportunity to do the same. The resulting authentic stories are hopefully a refreshing break from the hypocrisy and artificiality of so much Jesus centered media. CW: Me; AD: Kylie Paz