Crew: The crew was made up of faculty and students of Unusual Films and the BJU Cinema Department.
Cast: The cast was composed entirely of faculty, staff, students, and friends of Bob Jones University.
Locations: Filmed at Unusual Films Studios in Greenville, SC, at locations in the area surrounding Greenville, and at Northland Baptist Bible College (now Northland International University) in Dunbar, Wisconsin.
Music: The musical score for The Printing was composed and conducted by the former Dean of the School of Fine Arts and Communication, the late Dr. Dwight Gustafson. The music was performed by the members of the Bob Jones University Symphony Orchestra and recorded at the University’s own recording studio.
Front Projection: Actual scenes photographed in the Soviet Union were combined with sets and live actors by means of front screen projection equipment invented and manufactured by Unusual Films technicians.
Snow: Several scenes called for snow. To duplicate the snows of Russia, the film crew went to Northland International University in Dunbar, WI during the winter months. Most of the shooting at Northland was done at night
and at sub-zero temperatures. Production was uninterrupted, except for one night when the wind-chill factor plunged to fifty degrees below zero.
Fake Snow: Interestingly enough, two of the winter snow scenes were shot in downtown Greenville during the month of May using fake snow.
Storm: During the shooting of the press conference scene in a small church near Spartanburg, SC, a storm arose in a matter of minutes and quickly turned into a tornado. As the storm approached and the church lost power, everyone was hurriedly ushered into the basement, and a few surrounding neighbors joined them. Several of the roads were closed after the storm, and the cast was stranded for hours.
Song from the Church Service in the Woods
Over the years, many have contacted Unusual Films asking about the hymn that is sung in the scene where Dimitri attends a church service in the woods. The hymn is entitled “Not in Words of Prayers.” It is a Russian hymn which was arranged by the late Dr. Dwight Gustafson in 1990 for “The Printing.” The arrangement of the hymn and the English paraphrase we used in our film is owned by Bob Jones University, but we do not know who the original author of the hymn was. We did some additional research in 2011, and again, we were not able to identify the original composer. This hymn would fall into the category of “anonymous.”
One other thing of note is when we looked into this hymn, we found out that Russian hymn writers generally do not like to take credit for their work. They do not desire the attention, and they do not want to make money off of music written to worship the Lord.