Media

http://www.vimeo.com/31208681
This past Sunday, North Point Ministries launched Be Rich, our annual giving and serving initiative, which urges each of us to be rich toward others by participating in giving and serving opportunities both locally and globally. The campaign is based around 1 Timothy 6:18: “Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share.” With 5 campuses and a broader platform than we’ve ever had before, our goals this year as a church are larger than they have ever been, and the beneficiaries more numerous.

Our team was tasked with a number of different creative elements, from branding and graphics, to web design, to informational videos, to a forthcoming highlight video, to the opener video that you see above. I had the privilege of creating the opener, which was a synced video that played simultaneously with a live band at each of our campuses to kick off the 7-week initiative.

We knew that the title track from Eddie Kirkland’s new album, “Here & Now”, would be the themesong for Be Rich and that we would open the service with it. Outside of that, the video was a pretty open-ended idea. In concepting, I dreamed about it through the lens of our service programming “funnel”, in which we basically define the beginning of the service as our time to ENGAGE the congregation. (That does not mean to inform, force, challenge, or otherwise overwhelm them with too many details or action items.) The rest of the service was designed around focusing that emotion and giving people vision about the various opportunities they could participate in. So in an effort to avoid giving away Andy’s message too early, or losing the audience with details, we took everything we wanted to say and condensed it into strong, short, emotional statements designed to engage, inspire, and set up the rest of the service.

The initial Creative Brief I put together is below, which was basically a way of visualizing the video before creating it. After taking the concept into a creative meeting with the rest of the team, I ended up scribbling a whole bunch of notes and coming away with a pretty clear picture of how the video would look. In our team we try to document and get everybody on board with our ideas before executing them, so that we don’t get too far down a road and find ourselves having to backtrack. If you do not write up creative briefs for every one of your videos, we highly recommend it. It may seem like a lot of work on the front end, but the clarity it provides during execution is HUGELY beneficial.

From there it was just a matter of Final Cut, After Effects, loads of archive footage, lots of trial & error, and a severe overuse of the Twitch plugin. The whole turn was about a week and a half, and it could not have been what it was without the brilliant and constructive feedback of our team. In the end, we synced 8 channels of audio (various track beds and a click) to the video using Discrete Channels in Final Cut, and the band played live in time with it - which is the only way we could nail the lyrics popping on at the right time. I could probably do a whole other post about the technical side of that, but this is already getting long! For more information about Be Rich and to participate, visit: HowToBeRich.org. And, if you missed it, be sure to check out Andy’s message here to find out how you can be a part: NorthPoint.org/Messages

http://www.vimeo.com/28789294
If you follow Andy on Twitter, you may already be aware of this video that we produced as our service opener for this Sunday 9/11. We’re offering a downloadable version of it for churches to use, free of charge, as a memorial for the tenth anniversary of 9/11. You can download the H264 Quicktime file below:

Right-click HERE to download full res file (Quicktime Format)

Hilarious. So much of this “looks” familiar.
http://www.vimeo.com/24320919

There are so many things I love about this video. Some amazing life lessons, great footage, great edit, amazing sound design, and no music.

http://www.vimeo.com/24723686

When we arrived at this concept in the first creative meeting, we just knew we had to do it. But as excited as we were to take on the challenge, we also knew we were stepping into something we hadn’t really done before. We would need to create illustrations and then composite them into live-action moving-camera footage. Here are the steps we took to get from concept to creation.

Pre-visualizing

A project this complex required a lot of people to be involved. The more people involved, the more effort I had to put into making sure everyone was seeing the same video in their head.

To get us going, we found inspiration from already existing works. We said we really liked the feel of this: http://www.vimeo.com/14766975. Except we wanted stuff to be popping out of the book more like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g4kO9cEvUQ.

I’m terrible at storyboarding, but I forced myself to sketch out the shots. They were primitive looking, but a very helpful resource for making sure the special fx artist, the illustrator, and the DP were all on the same page. Feel free to make fun of my drawings.

Timeline

Once we knew all the moving parts that were involved, we had to divide out the available time into several intermediate deadlines. I had to schedule deadlines for the illustrations, a shoot date, a rough edit deadline, rough special effects deadline, and full composite deadline.

Production

Brian Bascle did our illustrations – this guy is a freelance artist who consistently nails it for us. All I had to do was send him detailed descriptions of the five scenes, and a little over a week later he sent me layered psd’s of his sketches.

While the illustrations were being worked on, I scheduled a shoot with Whisper Productions. They did the example video I linked to above, so working with them enabled us to start a couple steps beyond where we would start with anyone else. They use a RED ONE camera, which is capable of capturing the cinematic quality we were looking for. It was just a matter of casting the little girl, using interns to hunt down props, and deciding on a location.

In the meantime, our special effects guru, Taylor Cox, sent me a proof of concept with one of the first illustrations composited into a picture of his desk. He used 2D models in Cinema 4D to create realistic lighting and shadows. Brilliant. It was when I saw this that I started to feel really good about the project.

Post Production

So on one hand we had lots of shots of a little girl flipping through the pages of a Bible. On the other hand we had a handful of illustrated scenes from the Bible. It was time to put them together.

After finding just the right music track, I did a full edit by trying to imagine where the special effects would be. Some shots would likely change, but at least it was a starting point for Taylor to begin compositing the illustrations into the footage. It was at this point that I took a step back a let Taylor work his magic.

The timeline for the project allowed the most amount of time for this step. Taylor had about a week and a half to make it all come together. Between After Effects and Cinema 4D, he modeled, rendered, animated, motion tracked, added glows and particles, and color graded this behemoth across the finish line. I’m going to keep it light on the technical details for this post, but if you’d like to know more about any part of the process, leave a comment and we’d be glad to walk through the nitty-gritty.

North Point Media is a team of creatives that absolutely LOVE to leave an impression on peoples hearts in our growing number of campuses and partnership churches. We love to tell stories of life change, create ministry commercials,  and communicate through still designs.  Right now, we are looking for the position of Art Director.

The link below has all the “official” details, but if you want to to know what we are really looking for:

• You absolutely must love particles!
• You think bigger and broader than paper.
• You love collaborating and leading other creatives, especially over a burger at Wendy’s.
• You naturally make the box you or others are designing in feel really, really big.
• You welcome deadlines, especially yesterday’s.
• Your font library is massive, however you secretly only use 8 of them, most of which you have paid for.
• You believe graphic design has evolved outside of photoshop and illustrator and into the world of After Effects and Cinema 4-D.
• You will go the extra mile for the perfect aesthetic.
• You love a normal work week.
• You are passionate about the local church.

The standards are high, the timelines are short, and the deliverables are numerous - but the reward is great. We would absolutely love to hear from you.

Send application, resumé, and a link to your portfolio to media@northpoint.org.

**NPM Art Director - Job Description & Application**

We had a great time meeting some of you at Drive 2011.  Here’s a recap of the 3 days we spent together.  Thanks to our friend Marc Shroyer for his work shooting & editing this piece. Enjoy.

http://www.vimeo.com/22555645

First off, to everyone who made it to Drive, thanks for coming.  We thoroughly enjoy the chance to visit with and learn from you.

Sometimes in these visits, we’ll get asked a question along the lines of “How did you make that?”  Since it’s difficult to answer that question succinctly, I’ll often respond with something useless like “Magic!”, which I imagine is really irritating.  Sorry about that.

But that’s one of the reasons we have this blog– to continue these conversations throughout the year and get into those details.

I had the privilege of working on the center screen content for the opener to this year’s Drive.  It was easily the most gargantuan project I’ve worked on in my time at North Point, and it couldn’t have been pulled off with out a ton of help from Andy Wadell, Matt Gibson, and Brad Bretz, who were a huge help in pre-production and the execution of the side-screen content.  I may ask them to post something about the green screen shoot, since that’s not my area of expertise.  Anyways, here’s a small peek at what it took to execute the orchestral section of the opener.

(Note: For the time being we cannot post video of the actual performance, since we don’t yet have internet distribution rights on the music.  Sorry for the inconvenience, but hopefully that will be resolved.)

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http://www.vimeo.com/21157405

In the spirit of today’s holiday we thought we’d share a video that played the past two weeks in our Ten Before. This has quickly become a favorite amongst our staff and was a ton of fun to make. As always, our friends Tripp and Tyler are comedy gold. This piece was shot, edited, and composited by our green-screen-extraordinaire, Andy Waddell. He really pushed it over the top and made it a big hit in our services.

Enjoy!

Here’s video we made for MLK Day.  All images were public domain from Wikimedia Commons, a great source for archival images.  The speech audio came from Archive.org .  Martin Luther King, Jr assets are hard to come by as the King Center owns nearly all rights for this content.  Wikimedia Commons is a great source if you’re looking for historical elements.  I’ve pulled JFK images to George Washington paintings.

http://www.vimeo.com/19130201