This video is intended to set up the sermon each week of our 4 week series on fear entitled “Break Free.” We wanted the video to be a little bit more intense than normal for us and create a bit of tension. The idea is to get people thinking about their fears and waiting for the message to follow it with answers. The video starts with a “random” spin through a 3D list of “fears” that I compiled via Twitter and Facebook replies. I just took a wide range of the most common responses that I got. The goal was “to have someone seeing fears no matter where the looked.”
For those video graphics peeps who care, the following is for you. For the rest of you, skip on to the play button. I owe the “concept” of the video to Andrew Kramer of VideoCopilot.net for two fantastic free AE add ons: a SureTarget preset and a “shatter” autotrace script. I was trying to come up with some way to illustrate “breaking free” on the same day that Kramer released the shatter tutorial. The suretarget plugin technically could have been done without but it would have taken WAY longet to build the composition. I used the Suretarget preset on a null and parented a camera and a light to it. This moves between the 17 3D text layers as the video progresses. The camera and spotlight follow the null and have no keyframes. I used the spotlight to give a little dimension/gradient to the text instead of having a slightly more boring solid whitish colored text. The “dust” that floats throughout the fears was created using a single instance of Trapcode’s Particular and some “push buttons until you like it” settings. Again, I used those to add a bit more dimension and hopefully to make the camera moves more dramatic. I rendered the “fears” precomp out and placed it in the final comp where I used the shatter method from Kramer to break it apart and have the “Break Free” logo reveal itself. Chris did the initial series graphic design and I rebuilt it in After Effects so I could animate the layers. Finally, the music in the BG is “It is Natural to be Afraid” by Explosions in the Sky, fitting title I thought. I wish I had more time to find better or even have Fred create a unique background track but I had less than a day to turn this around in the end and time didn’t allow for that.
Here is the sermon intro video for our “Constructing Christmas” series at SSCC. We will play this video to set up the sermon for the next few weeks.
Chris and I tossed around a few ideas for the final look of this series’ graphics before we landed on this one. We were going for the feel of old blue prints but not technical drawings. As with many of our videos, I worked backwards. Chris designed the “series art” which appears at the end of the video. I worked backwards from there to cut everything into Illustrator layers and animate it in After Effects.
I bought John Williams’ “Carol of the Bells (Voices)” on iTunes (off the Home Alone soundtrack one-the-less). I chose that song because it instantly makes me think of Christmas when I hear it. Also, I wanted to communicate the peace and joy of Christmas and also a sense of urgency or hurriedness. I felt like the vocals accomplished all that.
Every one can stop holding their breath. I have posted again. Mainly because Fred asked me to post this.
We are in week 5 of a 6 week series on dating, sex and marriage. It has been a great series so far, we have gotten a ton of positive feedback and CD orders and podcast downloads have been above average for us.
Here is the intro video we used this morning and will use again next week to set up the two marriage messages. I think the video is pretty self-explanatory. On a technical note, this was our first attempt at using a green screen. We learned a lot in the process about editing keys in After Effects and lighting for a green screen and I anticipate a faster process and better results next time. The music for the video was done by Fred in ProTools, he did a great job syncing up and obviously capturing the feel of the Apple commercials we are playing off of.
Here is the intro video we are using to introduce the sermon in our current series. The series is called “Get In The Game” and it deals with our philosophy of ministry at SSCC and how we want our church body to walk it out. The main themes from the series are serving, living in community (small groups) and seeing lives changed by Christ. The messages so far have been great, head over to SSCC and pick up the podcast if you haven’t heard them. Everything for this series was designed around a ESPN Sportcenter concept. Our stage set has a Sportcenter news desk look, along with bleachers & goal posts framing our video screens. All of our staff and volunteers have been encouraged to come dressed in attire supporting their favorite teams. (Go Dogs.)
Back to the project. This is one of those deals that I am proud of but at the same time, I can QUICKLY identify things I would do differently across the board. I was limited with time to get good video footage for one thing. On the design end of things, again, if we had time, we could have created more layers and individual elements in the graphics and added more variety. But hey, we just aren’t in a place right now at SSCC where that kind of time is available. All the graphics for this series were designed in house, mostly by Chris. He designed the “title graphic” for this series first, this is the image that the video ends on. Everything else we have done has been based on that initial graphic. In the previous link you can see three images we have used.
The video is a combination of work from Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut Pro and After Effects. We took Chris’s graphics from Photoshop and Illustrator, video footage captured & edited in Final Cut and composited everything in After Effects. The BG music was thrown together by Fred even though I asked for it late. He got it in on his way out of town for vacation.
Again, I have to say that we are proud of the overall project. It took a lot of planning and coordination between people and applications. That being said. It is immediately apparant that there is much more we could have done to make it more professional looking. However, I have to regularly remind myself that our goal is not professionalism. Our goal is to effectively create environments where people can encounter Christ. I do believe the video did a good job of setting up our messages. Especially when seen in the context of the stage set and other elements around the building.
Here is the intro:
This second video is a loop that runs continuoulsy on two plasma screen TVs as a part of our set on stage:
Well, it has been a while since a worthwhile post came to these parts. I decided I am going to try to get back on the blog-bandwagon along with a couple of other potential web activities that you shall hear about soon enough.
I am posting a video that we will be using in church for the next few weeks as the sermon intro, between worship and the message. The series is “Just Breathe” and it is a 4 week study on the Holy Spirit.
I don’t know if it is good or bad to say that this video is the result of the better part of two days work, spread over a week. The graphic appearing at the end was designed by Chris for the series. I worked backwards from it to animate it and add motion along with all the text. Chris did the initial design in Photoshop I did all the animation in After Effects and created the “flourishes” that grow in the video in Illustrator. The text may change week to week, I am not sure yet.
The music behind it is “The Adventure” by Angels & Airwaves. (I tried posting on YouTube first but couldn’t get audio in there for some reason, so it’s hosted on my site and may take a bit longer to play.)
I figured I would share a video from church with the small portion of the internet world that visits here. This is a testimony intro video we played in church on our opening weekend in the new building. I edited it in Adobe After Effects with the chair being hand drawn, scanned & cut in Adobe Illustrator before I imported it to be ‘drawn’ in the video. Our new projection system is widescreen, that is why the video looks cut off on the top and bottom. YouTube automatically letterboxes it. Also, there is no sound. Fred, our worship director, played piano live during the video.
The point of the video I think is pretty self-explanatory when you see it. It set up David Wilkin’s testimony pretty well. Even though there is not much to it, it turned out to be super-effective.
While these stories are not technical and not DIRECTLY theological (Thanks to Rob Bell we know everything is spiritual), I had to share them.
First up is:
…a rare dolphin beating. Yes you heard me. A group of fishermen came upon a Ganges River Dolphin, “had never seen a creature like it” and beat it. They had second thoughts and tried to sell it as a rare fish, when that didn’t work, they left it on the steps of a museum. I guess they realized they were onto something just a little to late in the game.
I just want to say, who does that? Really? Its stinking 2008 people, who does that? Who finds a rare enough creature to potentially instill awe and wonder and just beats it to death? Also, know that this picture is not of that specific dolphin or one of those fisherman, I just got it on the web to be all illustrative of my message.
Second in our story is:
…a baby is thrown from a 4th floor balcony during a fire and survives. This one undoubtedly caught my attention because I have a little girl about this size. But seriously, WOAH. Can you imagine being the parents, having to throw their child to the people on the ground? I don’t know about that one. Like I said, the child survived, no word specifically on the parents, but some people were killed in the fire. I will let the pictures to the rest of the talking.
I just wanted to share another one of our videos. We are beginning a three week Christmas series this Sunday entitled “Be Still.” It is about, well, being still. You know, “Be still and know that I am God.” We saw a video at Drive Conference two years ago that made an impact on a lot of our staff and so we “adopted” their concept and made our own. The video was edited in After Effects and the graphics were created by my co-worker Chris in Photoshop.
The video will play following a prayer in the service. We will have all the lights out and wait about 8-10 seconds before we play it. That way there will be an awkward silence to get people’s attention and make the first word on the screen more noticeable. There is no audio on this video and there won’t be in the service either. If you get distracted, cut on iTunes and restart it. However, if you can’t make it through in silence, maybe you need to check on the podcasts of this series. HaHa.
Let me know what you think, and enjoy this special sneak preview if you are watching this before Sunday.
Travis
If you can’t get the video to play here, follow me over to YouTube.
About to years ago we did this video for a sermon opener. We were in a series studying David. This video is making a point about being overly concerned with the outward appearance. Our youth pastor, Jon Blankenship, is in this video as “JBlank.” Unfortunately for Jon, JBlank is a recurring character he plays that seems to always manage to make a fool of himself in each video. Somehow this video came up in the office today and I showed it to Fred, our worship director, who hadn’t seen it before. He insisted that I get it online so we could share it with the world. Make sure you hang on til the end to see Jon on the treadmill. Yes, he really fell. We were planning a fall and I had Bo running the camera while Jon was figuring out what he was going to do to fall. In the process, well, he fell. We staged a fall a couple more times but once he fell for real he couldn’t commit to a fake one and they weren’t nearly as good. I guess getting flung into the wall head first makes you gunshy. Oh, and sorry about the low image quality, I ripped it from a DVD and then had to re-encode it to upload it and that degraded it pretty noticeably.
Enjoy!
-Travis
I know some folks have had trouble playing embedded videos here, so if thats the case, here is the link to the file.
First up is:
