New documentary peeks inside Bullseye Glass

Context: The documentary tracks artist Tim Carey as he works on a 100 feet wide, 35 feet high, stained glass window for the Resurrection megachurch in Leawood, Kansas.

• Film director Justin Monroe began shooting footage as soon as his friend Carey, at the traditional stained glass company Judson Studios, won the multimillion-dollar contract.

The intrigue: Carey designed a storyboard packed with biblical characters, but did not know how to turn his painterly image into glass.

• Traditionally, stained glass has a paint-by-numbers simplicity, but Carey wanted detail and blended colors.
• Enter Portland's Bullseye Glass, which since 1974 had been making colored glass for artists to fuse, slump and blow.

Between the lines: Eccentric artist and technical expert Narcissus Quagliata knew how to use frit — sprinkles of broken glass that merge in the kiln — to stunning artistic effect.

• Quagliata's work is hypermodern but he teaches Carey how to translate electronic brushstrokes into a story window that dominates the new church.
• The two characters annoy each other but come to a mutual respect.

Flashback: The film glances at the period when Bullseye Glass was shut down by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality under suspicion of emitting heavy metals into the neighborhood air.

• The factory closed for three weeks in May 2016.
• Bullseye limited toxic chemicals, installed pollution controls, carried on making glass, and eventually settled a class action filed by neighbors for $6.5 million.

Flashforward: Monroe and Carey run a business now making glass and films. Carey is proud of the window.

• "If you sat with it, it would only take you an hour to be converted to Christianity, you'd be on your knees," Carey told Axios with a laugh.
• "And for the next 15 hours, you would just be looking at all the different stories."