The Lodge of Dawn has this week launched a new video, highlighting the benefits of Freemasonry in general, and The Lodge of Dawn in particular. The video features interviews with a number of the members of The Lodge of Dawn. The aim of the video is to give those with an interest in joining Freemasonry, an opportunity to hear directly from members.
The video discusses what Freemasonry isn’t, the type of people who can join the Freemasons, charitable giving, the social side of Freemasonry, a little about the ritual and the enjoyment our members get from being part of The Lodge of Dawn.
Bro. Ed Marks, from Thunder & Lightning Films in Cleckheaton, near Leeds, who produced the video said, “It’s been quite an interesting project from a creative point of view. You’ll notice it is completely, as it’s termed, ‘talking heads’ with no cutaways whatsoever; there’s nothing to go away from the people that are talking, where normally there would be something visually we would cut away to… but we don’t, which was a challenge.”
“What we also avoided was to go to the trendy stuff – like having two cameras and get two different views of the same person. So, what we were trying to do, and managed to make work, was to have no internal edits when a person speaks. They say their piece in one, and then we cut to the next person. You don’t have it that they say one thing and cut back to them saying the next thing.”
He added “It wasn’t scripted – that was the whole point. We were aiming for people to come in and just speak. We had open-ended questions for them to give their responses. The reason for having asked so many people to come along was so that we could ask most of the people the same questions. That way you can get different nuances to the answers that people give, and everybody comes across as being immensely sincere and that’s what this programme needed. In total, there was just under three hours’ worth of interviews to go through to get that final four minutes narrative.”
Preceptor W Bro. Raymond Diamond said “Last October, at a lodge meeting, our Worshipful Master, Rob Phillips, brought up the idea of improving our one or two page website. At the time, it was what it was. Rob decided that we needed to be 21st century and to use it as a tool to help to recruit candidates. We knew that, as a lodge, we weren’t immune from being without candidates and if we wanted to attract candidates, we needed to up our digital game. Other lodges historically had been in a worse position than us, but have come up to speed via online activities. Rob formed a committee and it was given free reign. My aspirations, at the time, were to take our website from the fourth division to perhaps the third division. This video is the icing on the cake. What this video has done is taken us to the Premiership!”
He followed by saying “I’m very grateful to everybody that volunteered and gave their time and energy. It comes across that we are a band of brothers and it’s very eloquently put by those people that volunteered to be interviewed.”
“We’re not giving any secrets away; we’re not showing what’s in the temple; we’re not showing what the references were. We’re just showing the plus points of Freemasonry and why someone should consider becoming a Freemason.”
You can find out more about Freemasonry on our 7 reasons to join the Freemasons page and any questions you may have will be answered on our FAQs page.
If you would like to join The Lodge of Dawn in Leeds, please feel free to get in touch via our ‘Contact Us’ page.