Media

One of our main goal for title packages is to set up tension for the speaker. Drive was one of the first and only times where that wasn’t our intention.

I wanted to take you through our process with this blog post, but there is a lot here so I broke it up into sections so you can skip around easy if you aren’t interested in reading the whole thing. Some of it can get pretty technical.

http://www.vimeo.com/11501538

::Concept::
Drive presents media with an interesting challenge. The conference itself has a theme. And we want our title packages to reflect that theme, but they immediately precede Andy (our senior pastors) message. Which may more may not have to do with the conference theme, but rarely have a very close tie.

And, on top of that, during the planning stages, what we had limited knowledge of what Andy would be sharing, but we did know the messages would have very different tones. Session 1’s video would follow worship and precede a message about the cross and then communion. Session 2 would be after a half hour of pure fun and games and be followed by a leadership talk about engaging your audience. And Session 3 would be after worship and be followed by a leadership talk.

With this in mind our intention was basically to create a “vibe” piece that set the stage for Andy and “celebrated” the idea of “Going Off Road”. We didn’t want to lean to hard into trying to say something with our title package because we know that would set up unnecessary tension for Andy, but we did want to emphasize that everything we were talking about was in line with “Taking it Off Road.”

Here is a link to the creative brief we created going into the shoot.

http://www.vimeo.com/11501582

::The Shoot::
Our DP for this shoot was Josh McKague at Whisper Productions. We couldn’t have asked for a more thorough and involved DP. On top of his preparedness, he had some family land that had the perfect mudding spots, and a great JEEP for us to use. Location was originally going to be the biggest challenge for this shoot, and it quickly became the easiest part. He also welded several camera mounts to get the shots we needed. (on front of the car, by the wheel well, over the tire in the back, and even a helmet cam). We shot with the RED, and two Canon Mark II 5D. We also used an underwater housing for one of the Canons (the one that got muddy). It was incredibly effective. The only difficulty was it was hard to know exactly what you were capturing with it, since the mud covered the lens and viewfinder constantly.

You might also find it interesting that our “jib” was a scissor lift that was out in the field we were shooting it. It worked perfectly.

Our cast, except for Josh’s crew was all volunteer from our staff or staff friends.

http://www.vimeo.com/11501620

::Editing::
Matt Gibson edited this piece for us. As he approached the videos his first task was to categorize and sift through the footage for the best shots. It was during this process that Matt decided the footage we had of cleaning up was so good that the final title package started to take on that theme instead of the original theme of “getting unstuck.” In the end this was a great change. It really gave the third session a nice conclusion to the conference.

The challenge of making 3 videos fit into three very different sessions was very apparent in the music choice. Its hard to find one piece of music that would work with the vibe of the title packages and the vibe of the session. During the music search (using Firstcom.com) Matt found some great music that all fit well together as a progression and decided to have each video have its own music track.

Technically, Matt color treated everything to have a desaturated look to match the muddy, dirty, gritty feel of the footage, then bumped the contrast levels and used the Magic Bulletin Film Look Suite to finish of the footage look. The footage already had such a great cinematic quality to it (mainly due to the color treatment and the low depth of field the cameras captured), that he cropped the footage even further to intensify the cinematic effect & have ability to adjust composition of the shot. Also, a lot of our footage was pretty shaky because of being mounted to a moving car. Matt tried to use the FCP smooth cam filter. It helped some, but most of that footage was not useable for an extended shot.

::What we learned::
It can be hard to get volunteers. Even on a staff as big as ours. I can be tough. I’m still trying to manage that tension. I’m just glad we had as many as we did. Next time, I hope to have more information up front so that they know exactly what they are getting into and feel more comfortable. Until we got into the mud there was a lot of unavoidable delay because of the amount of shots that had to be set up. Each time we remounted the cameras it took a good 30 minutes to set up.

When shooting something like this, get TONS of footage. Keep the cameras rolling as much as possible. With all the underwater housings and the fast motion, it was very hard to know what we were getting so we just kept the cameras rolling and got what we could. AND filmed EVERYTHING. We had no shots listed for getting cleaned up. It was a last minute add, but we filmed it all and it ended up being a really awesome final title package.

All in all, it had to be the most fun I have ever had working on a shoot. I got paid to go play in the mud all day, and we got some amazing footage doing it. I think we also have a pretty amazing JEEP commercial if anyone knows anyone at Chrysler (give ‘em my name).