With the football season over, you’d think NIU would be done making news. But the communication department hopes to make a mark for NIU as well.

Hot on the heels of the success of “Please Wait to be Seated,” another documentary is stirring up the West Coast.

“Save Them!: The Life of Paul Rader,” a documentary on the first Evangelist to hop on that odd new creation known as the “radio” back in the 1920s, was voted best documentary at the fourth annual “What You See is What You Get” Christian film fest.

Paul Butler, a communication graduate student, created the film as his thesis project. Butler worked together with thesis directors Jeffrey Chown and Laura Vazquez for 18 grueling months to create the 60-minute piece.

“This project was a case study in producing a historical documentary in the visual style of Ken Burns, without the use of a narrator,” Butler said.

Before shipping the final product off to San Francisco’s WYSIWYG festival, he screened a rough cut at last spring’s “Reality Bytes” film festival at NIU.

The enthused audience received the piece with open arms.

“He was very dedicated in making a piece that was moving and interesting,” Vazquez said. “He accomplished that.”

There was a screening at the Moody Bible Institute last Tuesday night, and Vazquez said Butler still was making changes to his piece the night before.

“He’s very dedicated on making the best piece he can,” Vazquez said.

Butler flew to San Francisco for the festival and had a chance to mingle with many of the media distributors about distribution rights for the film. Unfortunately, he is unable to distribute the film until he clears up some legal matters. “I need about $10,000 to fully complete the project. I need to procure the rights to 50 to 60 photographs,” Butler said.

“The project also continues to grow, and it looks like I may be shooting two or three more interviews and expanding the project to a 90-minute documentary to really do justice to the scope of [Paul Rader’s] life,” he said.