Here's a little about our work.

Storytelling is the heart of what we do on the video team. Storytelling is used in testimonies, highlight videos and creative promos. Here are a few tips on storytelling from Pixar’s own, Emma Coats.

#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

#2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.

#3: Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.

#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

#5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.

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As we’ve tried to demonstrate here, music is a critically important part in producing videos. It completely sets the tone and mood for the video. Music brings energy and makes you feel something. Sound must be taken seriously when being selected in videos.

We get a lot of questions where we get our music for our videos. This depends on what kind of music we are looking for. Highlight videos need an upbeat worship song with lyrics, while our Highlands News calls for mid-tempo instrumental tracks. Sometimes we just need an inspiring track to help communicate a testimony and some of the great things God is doing in our life. All of these different styles call for music that we may get at different places, so I am going to lay out some of those places where we start looking.

Review and Highlight Videos

Typically, we’ll use high energy worship songs. We just look for tracks on iTunes. We all also use Spotify. It’s a great tool for discovering and sharing music. We find it important as video producers to always be on the lookout for great songs that can be used for video. When we find a song that we think will be good for a video, we put it in a playlist called something like “Songs for Video”. Then when we have to make a video quickly or on short notice, we don’t have to spend a whole lot of time looking for a track.

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For interview and testimony videos, we like to use a two camera setup with a traditional 3-point lighting rig. In this post I will go over how and where we place our cameras, lights and microphone. Wherever we shoot, we use this system, and it works for just about every condition. For simplicity sake, our “virtual” shoot will be a studio setup.

Above is what our typical setup looks like. First lets talk about our camera placement. We always place the two cameras side-by-side. basically as close together as physically possible. The camera closer to the “interviewer” is always our tight camera. This is usually framed up from shoulders up to the head. Here is a screen shot of what this looks like.

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Stuff looks awesome in slow motion right? Most people have seen shows like Time Warp that really slow things down, almost to a stop, that make something ordinary, look amazing! But did you know that many times, you are watching slow motion and you don’t even know it?

I first heard about this concept of shooting in slow motion without the intension of letting the viewer know he is watching slow motion while watching a Lord of the Rings behind the scenes video. They chose to shoot some scenes at about 80% slow motion speed, then re-recording the audio to match up with the slowed down footage. The reasoning behind this was to make the scene feel a bit dreamy, and to give it an ethereal quality. Turns out that this technique is used all the time, but we don’t notice it until it gets down to about 75% or slower.

For our recent Father’s Day video, we chose to shoot everything at 80% speed, to create that dreamlike, nostalgic quality that hopefully helps paint the picture that we were trying to present, without distracting the viewer by them noticing that what they’re watching, is actually in slow motion.

Take a look at the video below, and then I’ll explain a great way to capture beautiful slow motion footage.

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Before joining the creative team at Highlands, I spent the previous four years traveling the world and making videos as a crew of one. Make no mistake about it, there are definite advantages to working as a team.

At Highlands, we try to have at least two to three people, if not more, on a shoot. We’ve learned that more eyes and ears you have on set the less likely you are to make a mistake, however there are still situations that arise when everyone on the team finds themselves shooting solo.

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There is a saying that goes something like this: “People are sheep.” In other words, people tend to go in the direction a good leader, or Shepherd, takes them and I think this same principle applies to coordinating talent for a video shoot. When each person on camera understands clearly what is expected of him or her and their time, then they are much more willing to agree to put themselves in what is, for many, an uncomfortable position: appearing on camera.

Over the past few years I have picked up on a few tips that have worked for us. I hope these prove to be beneficial for your shoots as well!

1. Convey the three W’s.

This means that each potential participant, regardless of age, understands the three “W’s” of well-organized video shoots: when, where, and what.

When:

He or she needs to know when she is needed. Will this be a thirty-minute interview, or a two-hour Easter testimony? A morning or evening shoot? Make sure they know how much time is involved so they can make plans to leave school or work early, etc.

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Something that we are very careful about here is making sure that we don’t put the “creative” that’s in us as a team over the message of the content we’re delivering. It’s easy to forget about the end goal of what you’re producing when your primary focus is on making something “cool”.

Something fun we do every year is have a series called “At the Movies.” We take stories with Biblical principals and use them as modern day parables. Some of our favorite things to create for this series are the video promos. It’s one of our few times a year to try something that’s fun and cinematic.

For last year’s promos, we focused on a Western genre theme that we used for many of these videos. For our first one, we wanted it to be really epic, and pretty stereotypical of old school westerns. We wanted a rough and tough lead man, a silly sidekick, and lots of guns.

This is the part where we could have easily gone off the tracks a little bit. It’s great to have fun and be creative, but we try to find the balance of keeping the videos fun and silly, but still get our message across. The whole point of the video is to get people excited about this “At the Movies” series and give them information on how to invite their friends.

Here’s the final product. Hope you enjoy.

Sometime ago, I heard that Walt Disney had a revelation. The philosophy for their parks, rides, and video environments would be:

“70% of what our guests see is what they hear.”

Honestly I don’t know if this really came from Disney, or if anybody has ever said it… but I believe it.  What you hear in a video can make or break the product.  Watch the video below:

Now try and watch it with the volume muted. Notice how the sounds and music make the video.

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In my post, Stealing and Adapting, I wrote about how we regularly look for videos and graphic ads that inspire us and then use them to help create the media at Highlands. Our current series, Running with the Giants, is a perfect example of this.

In this series, Pastor Chris based his message on a different hero of our faith each week. We decided that it would be a cool idea to have a different opener/graphic each week that highlighted who he would be speaking about. Callie, our Creative Arts Manager, suggested that we have each character drawn in comic book style and the opener could be a comic book animation telling the basic story of their life.

After some discussion, someone in the team thought of the show opener to the series, The Pacific. We thought we could use the style of their title package and shoot something similar for our opener video. This would be something different and unique to our normal style, and give us a memorable series package. Here is the video that we took our inspiration from:

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We loved the style of the drawing and thought the action of charcoal drawn onto paper looked great. We found a local artist in town who worked with charcoal and commissioned him to create eight weeks worth of artwork.

To read more about this process, please continue after the break.

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If you are like me, the first time I heard that someone was using an After Effects template to create a video opener, I thought it was either “cheating” or lazy. But in reality, there is no shame in using a template.

Templates can be a great resource if you want a complex or detailed look in a short amount of time. Instead of spending a week playing around in After Effects, you can spend half of a day editing a template, inserting your content, and making your video look as good as a week’s worth of work. This is particularly useful in crunch time situations or for projects that need to be done last-minute.

Recently, I was asked to create a video opener for the ARC Conference (a church-planting event). It needed to be generic for many different types of ministry schools, relate to students, and it had a really tight deadline. So, I went template-searching and finally found this. I really liked the overall film look and inserting my own video content was pretty easy.

So after a couple of hours of searching through b-roll that I had already accumulated, I had a pretty good looking opener, but it still needed some work. So, I cut up a song that I liked and ironically enough the transitions in the opener almost lined up perfectly with the song (don’t you love when that happens). After re-timing some sections and adding a couple of light leaks, I had an opener.

Now, don’t let this be an excuse to use templates all the time. Stay creative! But when it comes down to it, templates are a great tool to use when crunch time comes, or if you want a polished look in a short amount of time.

At Highlands, we believe giving service attendees a break from the traditional on-stage announcement of upcoming events is a welcome change to the Sunday routine! We have found that they keep people engaged and from playing Temple Run after praise and worship. Over the years we have found that there are a few key elements to making the most of an audience’s attention span through effective script writing.

1. Know your audience.

Who are you writing this script for? What language would most appeal to him or her? When you understand that, the entire announcement process becomes easier. At Highlands we have found that what works best for us is to keep the tone friendly and upbeat. I like to advise our on-screen talent to think about how they would communicate with someone visiting their home for the first time. You would be as welcoming, energetic, and engaging as possible to help them feel more comfortable.

2. Who, what, when, where, why?

What is the average age of a first-time attendee? What about the service as a whole? Keep that target age group in mind when writing your announcements. What format or tone would most appeal to them? Is it humor? Spontaneity? Routine?

3. When it doubt, keep it out.

Announcements that are too long become boring. Keep interdepartmental announcements within those areas, and Sunday-morning announcements to those things that only apply to Sunday morning visitors or members. For example, we try to only announce four main things: our Growth Track, small groups, connection/pastoral care cards, and special events (such as church-wide conferences or special guests). We do not announce the upcoming nursery/preschool picnic or visiting the Info Desk if you lost your car keys.

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