Do any of my fellow Latter-day Saints also spend too much time thinking about what a daunting task the church videos have? Namely, to give us meaning and emotion with very little story in a medium that thrives on story, and also without doing much that isn’t 100% included in scripture? That’s hard.

The animatic ones are more effective at it because they have narration and somewhat abstracted visuals. But the live action ones have to fall back on sweeping, emotional music and impactful visuals. There’s a lot of good craft going on in there, but it’s a tall, tall order.

I think that’s why the Testaments worked so well. About 95% of it was original content and many of the elements from the Book of Mormon weren’t entirely accurate. But most people didn’t care because it was a good story that effectively evoked those spiritual emotions.