Over the years we have witnessed some pretty crazy “scripture notes”, “lower thirds”, and “titles” in the church world. Even North Point, on occasion, has been guilty of going a little off the ranch with some CRAZY looking lower thirds. No really, I’m not kidding. When your lower third is actually a third of your screen and the transition you programmed for it takes longer than 14 seconds - you might be a part of the “My lower thirds are more creative than your lower third” club. It definitely begs the question - are we thinking more about the creativity of some of these assets or their purpose; to communicate information?
Soooo, last summer we made the decision to TEMPLATE all of these assets. By template I mean that the animation, the shapes, and the concept of each series would have the same style of execution. The look inside of the template, however, would have different aesthetics that would be influenced by the look of the series.
We did this for two main reasons:
1 - We would NOT have to reinvent the wheel for every new series or message. We would just follow the same template and focus on implementing the aesthetics of the design.
2 - Predictability for the audience. Every time you animate something different, change a shape, a move, or even a FONT it not only takes some getting used to but it takes people’s focus away from the most critical piece - the information.
Let me say it this way when it comes to your lower thirds: Don’t let your creativity compete with the information, complement it.
One of the biggest changes we made in the development of the scripture slides specifically, was the addition of either the LOGO or ICON of the series. WE found that the more you push for this in your Key art - the easier it is to implement it elsewhere. A question you should ask in your design process: if I take this title/logo, lift it off it’s background, put it somewhere different, will it still be unique.
Below are some examples of of our series both with scripture notes and titles:
EASTER
“I Love my Church”
“White Flag”
“The Thin Line” with John Woodall.
“The Me I Want to Be” with John Ortberg
“Taking Responsibility For your Life” (we went a little different for the titles, which is ok to do, but at least you KNOW you are doing it. It’s ok to go outside your box, just determine what your box is.)
What are you doing with your scripture notes, lower thirds, or title slides?
May 25th, 2010 at 8:59 am
LOL! I pray for the day that we actually know ahead of time what Pastor is going to preach so we can prepare graphics.
May 25th, 2010 at 9:22 am
All the more reason, IMHO, to create a container for your last minute graphics to go into. Thanks for the comment Mark!
May 25th, 2010 at 10:55 am
We’ve tried to do lower thirds but like what Mark said it’s hard to get them before the week is over. Also, we are looking at what equipment to get. We want to do what you guy do at NP, lyrics over live footage and lower thirds during the service. What equipment would you guys recommend? Thanks
May 25th, 2010 at 12:46 pm
Hey Eric,
We use ProPresenter for our lyrics and right now we use Keynote for our lower thirds. We hope to be changing to ProPresenter 4 very soon. Lots of new features that we are really excited about.
May 25th, 2010 at 1:51 pm
Thanks for the article. I’ve been making lower thirds for our sermon packages and always change the font and everything for each different series. I like the idea of keeping it all the same and just adapting certain elements from the series graphics. In the long run that would make it much easier to create them.
May 27th, 2010 at 8:56 am
I think I sometimes over do it. I’ve animated the whole lower thirds and changing fonts for sermons thinking this is cool, but in retrospect it was distracting. So I’ve went to kind of how you are talking with making it more a template that is consistent.
August 22nd, 2010 at 1:01 pm
What is the font that you decided on? How many fonts did you try before settling on the one?
May 18th, 2011 at 10:46 am
The font looks like Gotham.