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:

What do ya’ think?

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.)

Enjoy
-Travis

[quicktime]http://www.travispaulding.com/Uploads/JB_Intro_2_small_h264.mov[/quicktime]

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.