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.
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.
Here is a video that we did a few months ago. I have had a few friends ask for me to put this on the web so they could see the interfaces we did. The sermon series we were in at the time was called “iReach: Changed Lives.” It was kind of a vision casting/clarification time for our church. It was a four week series, week one was “Changed Lives,” week two was “Reach Up,” week three was “Reach In,” and week four was “Reach Out.” It really was a great series, you can check out the messages and more here at the church media page. We are finally starting to get release permission from folks so we can put this stuff on the web. The testimony about the Home Group being a pillar in the time of need is pretty awesome.
In addition to the message of this video, the production was pretty cool too. This video was filmed and edited almost entirely by two high school students. (One of which is the son of the couple in the video.) I helped them set up the cameras and capture the footage. They did all the editing, audio sweetening and most of the color correction. (I didn’t check the color balance on the second camera, oops. It needed more color correction than time allowed for.)The interface at the beginning was created in house. I made an iTunes knockoff look. I redrew the basic layout and a different color scheme in Adobe Illustrator. We then set the order for the 4 week series and the videos in each service and animated the Illustrator file in Adobe After Effects. This helped to create the illusion of a camera zooming in and out on the iReach interface, showing the previous videos and the next one to be played. To top off the project, our worship director, Fred McKinnon, scored the soundtrack for all of the videos we did in this series.
Well, enough talky.Here is the video. Let me know what you think. We were pretty proud of the whole series look once it was finished. I think it really made people evaluate their own roles in God’s plan. The “i-theme” was used in the print materials and on screen as well. We believe it helped them to personalize things, not to mention it is culturally relevant. If for some reason anyone wants it, I can supply the After Effects CS3 and Illustrator CS3 files that we used if you want to do something similar. Just let me know.
