CityView Magazine

38 | July/August 2016 Academy. Just as McLamb had hoped, he has managed to do passion projects be- tween commercial shoots, finishing a num- ber of short films, as well as a full-length independent feature film titled Masquerade in 2009. Masquerade follows the story of a high school girl, reaching out to a peer who she believes is hiding a troubled home life. Currently, McLamb is in post production for his second full length feature film, Restoration, due out later this year. "is guy (Ken Stewart), he comes to me and says he wrote this script that he wants me to look at. I have known him for a while, so I say 'Okay,' and he hands me this 300 page script," McLamb said. "at's like three movies right there. An average script is maybe 90 pages … I read through it, and saw that it had this great potential." e two of them spent the next three years rewriting it, and finally got to the point where they said they were ready to make the movie. "We are hoping to have a trailer by June," McLamb added. Like Masquerade, Restoration is a story about redemption and spirituality. In it, a mechanic named C.K. Erwin (played by Restoration story writer Ken Stewart) loses his family and is driven to the brink of suicide. Erwin gets a new lease on life aer befriending a family which needs him as much as he needs them. "Ken preached the idea that God is in the 're' business. He restores, he rebuilds and [the characters] find that place that leads to God and [they] find healing through that," McLamb said. "Pretty much everything I do has that faith-based bent to it, even though I think my films tend to be darker and more realistic than some might expect." Faith-based films like those produced by McLamb have garnered far more respect within the film industry than they have in the past, thanks in no small part to success stories like 2014's Pure Flix-produced God's Not Dead, its 2016 sequel, God's Not Dead 2, the ongoing success of Kirk Cameron's Le Behind film series or last year's wildly successful War Room, which made $73.7 million in the box office, despite only hav- ing a budget of $3 million. For McLamb, the success of these films has meant that potential investors see his work as less of a gamble, even if he himself Photos contributed by JerFilm

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