Media

For Christmas we had quite a few requirements for our Keyart.
1. It needs to symbolize the tension of the series — “God uses the most unlikely people to fulfill his promises”
2. We wanted it to look “Christmasy.” Once it is on a resource center shelf it should be quickly recognized as Christmas.
3. We needed a look that would work for the series AND our title package. (more details below)
4. We wanted to do all this while still keeping in mind our 4 main objectives when designing a series:

1. Tension
2. Symbolism
3. Uniqueness
4. Excellence

Keyart Requirements
We wanted something that was “Christmasy” but unique. Generally for Christmas, I am of the opinion that we should strive for something warm, inviting, and dare I say traditional. I’m very careful saying traditional here, but I do mean it. With Christmas I feel being too cutting edge can be disengaging. We want people in our environment to feel caught up in the season. There is so much emotional connection to Christmas already, so why not leverage that to make people feel welcomed and excited. I’m not saying everything needs to look like a Thomas Kincade painting, but some tradition is good. Starbucks does a really great job of this in my opinion. Everything feels warm, inviting, and traditional, but STILL unique. Would really love to know your feedback on this as well. It would be helpful (got to make Christmas unique again next year after all :-).

Also, this year, we have a very prominent sketch in our title package. The sketch (called “Velma’s Diner”) is set like a sitcom with its own music and title package that is separate from the rest of the keyart. We needed to come up with keyart that referenced the sketch without being too closely tied. There needed to be elements that matched, but we didn’t want the sketch to become the look and feel. We felt that if the sketch became the look and feel the overall communication of the “bottom line” for the series would suffer. This became difficult to figure out, but it was an important challenge. Even when a sketch is present, keyart should always err on the side of reinforcing the bottom line. When someone thinks of the series later, or looks at the DVD in our resource center, what they see should communicate the point of the series as clearly as possible. The more this is true the more successful we feel we were on a series design.

Creative Chronology
First, we brainstormed a bunch of ideas and directions steaming from the idea of “unexpected” or “unlikely” people being a part of Christmas. A lot of energy started forming around the idea of having a perfect classic Christmas scene with something just a little bit “off”. Maybe a Christmas tree with a star falling at the top, or a shabby tree in the middle of a town square. After some initial ideas started coming though, we got this logo sketch from one of our freelance designers, Brian Manley.  This really got our imaginations going:

So we started pushing in somewhat of a new direction. We thought it would be cool to have the keyart look like a perfect Hallmark Christmas card, with the “An _____ Christmas” part of the logo being part of that card. Then make it look like someone taped the word “Unexpected” over the card. There was a lot of debate over what the card should look like. Should it be “overly” perfect like a Thomas Kincade painting, or a Christmas card you’d give your grandmother? At first we thought this could be a cool idea, like we took something that was so overly traditional and we “messed it up.” But we soon realized that by having the majority of the keyart be overly traditional and dated we were in effect making something overly traditional and dated. So we decided to go with something that would look good even without the “unexpected” but was still warm and inviting. Hopefully we pulled it off, though I still wonder if we played it too safe.

Also, throughout all of this we tried to keep in mind the small town aspect of things. We figured the best way to do this would be with the front cover image. We tried dozens of pictures for the front cover, with each of them trying to find the one that really emphasized a small town and Christmas. Not really finding any, we made one. (I mean REALLY, stock websites, not one valid small town Christmas image, REALLY?! — that made for a couple “calm down” walks around the building.) So, we found a snowy small town and added a christmas tree to what we saw as the city center. The effect worked better than expected. I was really nervous about it looking cheesy, still kind-of am, but my mom tells me its AWESOME!

With Brian refining the logo and keyart image, we landed on this (right):

Promo Woes and Why its Good to have Teammates
For the promo, we were stuck with yet another problem.  As we mentioned, our team has been putting TONS of energy into a series of sitcom-style sketches entitled “Velma’s Diner” that we are playing before each message as an entertaining parallel to Andy’s content.  (The sketches are coming out GREAT by the way, and I’m sure we’ll be posting them soon as well as some stuff we’ve learned along the way.)  We had visual content from the Velma’s Diner shoot, but we’d only decided on the series keyart on Monday and it was Tuesday afternoon with a promo needing to run on Sunday. When we had first discussed how to promote the series (many weeks prior), we figured we’d simply create our “Unexpected Christmas” promo by doing some small changes to the sitcom style intro animation that we did for Velma’s Diner (below).

It wasn’t working.  The animation fit great as the intro for the actual Velma’s Diner sketches, but even if we were to modify it completely as planned (taking out the name credits, changing the end tag to “an Unexpected Christmas”, etc), it didn’t have enough to do with the overall message series to act as a motivator for people to attend–basically, its frame of reference was too narrow. The sketches are a PART of the series, but the scope of Andy’s messages and the keyart as a whole is actually much broader–the sketches are more of a supplement. So we scrapped that idea and pulled the team together.

I still can’t believe it worked, but Brad called Lane Jones (the brilliant script writer for Velma’s and Campus Director at Browns Bridge), who wrote a script Tuesday night tying the bottom lines of Andy’s messages AND the Velma’s sketches together into a compelling trailer. Wednesday afternoon we got one of our best voice over guys in to read it, Paul Ryden. Then Brad worked on the motion graphics from home that night and came in the next morning with an awesome promo draft. After some small touch ups by the team, it was out the door ready to go on Thursday afternoon.  The finished promo ended up going a COMPLETELY different direction than we had originally intended, but it helped to better promote the “big picture” identity of the series, really hinging on the magic of Christmas and the emotional connection that people have to the season.  For the time we had to create it, I think it came out pretty strong:

Are you guys doing a Christmas series at your church?  How are you designing/branding it?