Few tips I used:
Public Domain, Public Domain, Public Domain, did I mention Public Domain?
Search the World Wide Web (invented by Al Gore) for Public Domain images & video clips.  Presidential Archives/Library of Congress.  Be sure to read the fine print for usage.

3D space + Depth of Field
A simple camera move with small variable depths in Z space adds big impact.  Make sure DOF is enabled on your 3D Camera.

Blending + Feathering Edges
Play with blend modes (Click Layer, keystroke: Shift +) is the AfterFX shortcut to fly through them. You’re bound to find one that is AWESOMENESS.  I wanted seamless montage, Mask and Feather your edges

Effects: Turbulent Displacement
To make a still flag wave from the key art I used Turbulent Displacement. Play with keyframing it.

Effects: Stroke
Mask your Text layer and then use Stroke to draw it on.

Adjustment Layer
I added an overall adjustment layer to BOOST Saturation and give the Key Art colors more pop for video.  Print colors and video usually don’t translate well.

Well, Hope you find some of these tips helpful, they aren’t much but are pretty simple methods to help make simple things more dynamic.
WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR GO TO TRICKS?

Key Art Design- Pat Malone

The premise (surrender) and imagery (a white flag) were pretty straightforward.  However, we’re always challenging ourselves to come up with fresh, unique designs rather than just take the easy way out.

Our initial inspiration came from papercraft; we liked the depth and dimensionality in the designs we were finding, as well as the unique symbolism found in the juxtaposition of the cut-out and the model itself.  It also allowed us to steer toward a design that was completely white and yet still interesting and dynamic.  Unfortunately, none of us are papercraft masters, so I needed to try and fake it using a 3D modeling program (Cinema 4D in this case).  Plus, this needed to look like white fabric, not white paper.

(CLICK THUMBNAILS FOR FULL-SIZE IMAGES)

As these compositions were pushed toward better and better execution, the general consensus was this: the idea was cool, the designs looked cool, but something was missing.  Whether it was lacking emotion or some sort of undefinable “it” factor, I wasn’t hitting the mark.  I thought that the flag had the potential to be a very strong symbol, but it was perhaps being overwhelmed by the text.  So I started to steer away from the papercraft idea and toward designs with a more prominent flag.

At this point I started asking myself some tough questions.  Did this design really need to be 3D?  3D modeling adds a lot of potential for visual interest and can allow you to do some unique and even mind-bending things; however, it’s not necessarily always the answer.  I hadn’t to this point allowed myself to explore other options.

I decided to strip the design down even further, and relied on negative space, contrast, spacing, and scale to pull the necessary emotion and meaning out of this design, rather then trying to be overly complicated.  The white flag was a strong symbol, and I wanted to maximize that potential.

This design, by a longshot, generated the most positive response.  It may be the simplest design we’ve ever done– honestly, I spent about 15 minutes on the composition itself– but in this case, simple was the way to go.

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?

Typographic motion graphics pieces are all the rage right now– and why not?  If communication is your goal, words are usually helpful.  However, since typography-centric videos have become so common, you need to stretch your creative canvas a bit if you’re going to create a piece that is both powerful and unique.

For the one-part sermon “Focus” at Browns Bridge Community Church, the art direction– led by Mike Davis– gravitated toward the concept of the eye chart.  It’s a simple symbol, it’s easy to understand, and when you play with depth-of-field, it’s visually interesting.

When I set out to create a Title Package (a one-minute video we create and use to introduce each sermon), my initial idea was to continue in this same direction: eye-chart, depth of field, some motion, some relevant words, etc.  And that probably would have made for an adequate Title Package.  But as I worked, I had this nagging feeling that I wasn’t using the medium to its fullest extent.  Motion design has incredible potential for communication– you can use images, movement, sound, anything to present an idea.  Here, I saw a great opportunity to use movement to communicate.

The idea of the sermon, very simply, is that there are many things in our lives– such as work, family, school, money, friends, etc.– that, though they are important, can distract us from God.  But rather than present these words with meaningless motion, I wanted to capture the sense that all of these aspects of our lives are competing for our attention, and in our frenzied attempt to keep up with all of them, we lose focus.

I was inspired by metaphorical images for the internet, or “the information superhighway”– all of these little pieces speedily moving in different directions.  As the camera jumps from piece to piece, I wanted it to be slightly difficult for the viewer to focus on even the one word in the frame, like they’ve been dropped into some sort of race, and, in their struggle to hang on, they’ve become a bit disoriented.  (Nothing too crazy, though… “pain” isn’t typically one of our goals.)

With the reveal at the end, my thinking was: there was this big, important, stationary thing that we were missing the whole time.  All we needed to do was pull out, change our focus, and everything else fades away.  Originally the reveal was going to be “God,” but we make an effort in our Title Packages to not give away the meat of the sermon.  But hopefully, the message still came through clearly.

HIGHLIGHT VIDEO. Let’s start with the last video played.
Click here to view the embedded video.

DRIVE OPENER
For copyright purposes we can’t put the TobyMac song we played (and the singer coming out of the ceiling.) Some things you just have to be there for!
We will try to get the graphics up for the song a bit later.
Click here to view the embedded video.

TITLE PACKAGES for all sessions.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Click here to view the embedded video.

DRIVE-BYEs for all sessions
Click here to view the embedded video.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Click here to view the embedded video.

MINUTE TO WIN IT intro.
We copied the show but had to start from scratch on ALL the graphics.
Click here to view the embedded video.

SUNDAY’S COMING
Click here to view the embedded video.

FUN THEORY
Click here to view the embedded video.

TWITTER TRACKER (intro)
Click here to view the embedded video.

DRIVE LOGO (loop)
Click here to view the embedded video.

Earlier this month, I was given the task of creating a new promo for this year’s MarriedLife Live Christmas event.  Last year’s promo was both simple and effective, so we wanted to build on that foundation with a fresh coat of paint.  Charged with merely adding “more pizazz” (I believe that was the phrase), I thought this was a good opportunity to experiment some.  (Note: This is not always a good idea.  It can be time-consuming and has a 46.5% chance of ending in tears.  It’s better to experiment in your free time and apply later.  I got lucky this time.)

Creating the Scene

I’ve dabbled a little in 3D modeling in the past, mostly with the headache/opportunity known as Blender (a free, open-source 3D program).  Most of my work, however, was based more in typography than actual objects or scenes.  But after searching around the internet for some Christmas motion graphics inspiration, I thought I would try my hand at modeling a three-dimensional cartoon-style forest.

After about an hour in Cinema4D, I had something that may have resembled a few trees, but was probably more akin to some clusters of green Hershey’s Kisses.  Still, it was an okay proof-of-concept– even if it’s not the greatest looking thing in the world, it’s good to reach a point where you know that, if you keep pushing it forward, it’ll eventually get there.

The models ended up being the easiest part of the project.  Other little details– like camera rigging, lighting, and especially texture work – proved to be a bit more difficult.  I spent probably more time than I should have trying to perfect the texture for the fallen snow, trying to find that right balance between smoothness, bumpiness, and reflectivity.  I also played around with actually modeling the clumps of snow on the trees themselves, and it could have looked great . . . after a few weeks of work.

Making the Scene…Magical?

My renders out of Cinema4D were actually pretty bland.  Fortunately that was part of the plan.  Cinema4D and After Effects work really well together, and it saves hours if you leave tasks like color correction, effects, and particle systems to After Effects.  When you render out of Cinema, you can also tell it to create an AE comp, complete with camera and lighting data.  From there, I was able to create falling snow with Particular within After Effects that actually reacted to my Cinema4D camera.  Thanks to a new feature of Particular 2, the individual particles can be shaded by your After Effects lights (which in this case, again, were originally generated by Cinema4D).  This little trick added a lot of realism and depth to the falling snow, if even only for a couple of seconds.  All of the other little finishing touches– the sky, the stars, the glow, the general color of the scene, and the text– were all done in After Effects.

Bringing it Together

The team did a great job of giving me feedback early on in the process.  This was essential since each Cinema4D scene took anywhere from 1 to 4 hours to render, even at the most basic settings.  The last part of the project was spent in Final Cut, just like any other project, making sure the timing, the music, and the flow of the story all felt right– not to mention the actual information presented by the video…which can change at any moment, including the last one.

For Christmas we had quite a few requirements for our Keyart.

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).

Click here to view the embedded video.

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:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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