Media » Drive Videos

Drive 2011 Highlight

Matt — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 19:41:51 +0000

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Drive ‘11 Opener Behind the Scenes, Part 1: The Orchestra

Taylor — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 15:55:56 +0000

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.)

Obviously, before any footage was shot, composited, or animated, we planned extensively. We made storyboards, test sequences, and sometimes just doodled:

While Andy and Matt were shooting our instrumentalists, I started work on creating the stage, which took form as something like a bandstand, since the orchestra needed to fit into a three-level-tall grid. It was modeled in Cinema4D and exported as a single still image.

The stage was brought into After Effects, and it was time to begin compositing. Now, I’m not sure how obvious this was live, but the eventual 49-piece orchestra was actually only made up of 7 unique individuals. Andy and Matt shot them from different angles, wearing different clothes, with hair up and down, etc. Even so, making sure our orchestra didn’t look like some sort of clone army was a bit of a challenge. Luckily, we were going for a mostly silhouetted look (with highlights being the primary details), so the identical faces weren’t a huge problem. I should also note that the string and percussion players were legitimately playing the music you heard. That’s not something you can fake and get away with.

Easily the most tedious part of the whole process–in fact, the entire opener– was getting all of the instrumentalists timed to the final music track exactly. I’m not sure how many of you have ever worked with audio in After Effects, but let me assure you, it’s not the place for precision audio editing. Fortunately, Andy worked up a sync system later on in the process that really helped streamline the rest of our work.

To create the illusion of depth, each successive row was increased in brightness and blur, as though they were disappearing in a haze of bright light. Each player’s color correction had to be animated individually as the center lights expanded and intensified.

The lights themselves were a product of Video Copilot’s Optical Flares plugin (link). If you’re not familiar with Optical Flares or Video Copilot, I encourage you to check it out. They make some of our favorite plug-ins and scripts, ranging from free to not-that-expensive. My Optical Flares layers were controlled by regular-old After Effects light layers, which allowed me to easily animate the intensity of each individual light.

On top of it all, I used a plug-in called Magic Bullet Looks to adjust the overall color and give it that bronze “epic” feel. The most important addition was a diffusion layer, which gave all of the brightest points a realistic glow.

For the climax, it was as simple as cranking up the lights even further and animating a curves adjustment layer (the red and green channels specifically) to transition the bronze into a bright gold. Because we all know that gold beats bronze.

When it was all said and done, this section of the opener (roughly 1 minute and 45 seconds) took 22 hours to render. When you have 49 keyed 1080p video files playing simultaneously (not to mention layers and layers of color correction and plug-ins), it’s going to take some time to digest. So make sure you anticipate your render times when working on large projects.

Check back in soon and we’ll walk through Part 2…

“Sunday Morning” Video

Brad — Wed, 19 May 2010 17:44:26 +0000

On May 5th, we posted a video on our blog called “Sunday Morning”. This video was posted in a catalog of other videos from our annual Church leader conference we host called DRIVE. As a standard practice, we post our videos for the larger creative community because some of our best learning comes from those who view and comment on our work. Well, one week later and over 350,000 hits, this 3-minute video has created quite a stir. If context determines meaning, we can understand some of the questions and confusion surrounding this video. We unintentionally provided no context for it (like we did for all of our Drive videos) and some people have attempted to construe their own meaning for the video. While the conversations have been rich, we now feel responsible to provide some context to help people understand our purpose for the video. “Sunday Morning” was used specifically to employ fun into the conference and set up a message by Andy. The video was meant to be satirical and comical and Andy’s message unpacked the why behind our Sunday morning programming philosophy. That’s all there was to it. Thank you for taking the time to read this and thank you for your responses on the various blogs.
Brad

VIDEOS FOR DRIVE ‘10

Brad — Wed, 05 May 2010 20:09:24 +0000

Hey everybody. First of all, if you came to Drive 2010 we are so humbled and honored that you would take time out of your busy schedule to come to North Point and let us pour what is in our cup into yours. It was great to see old friends and meet new ones. Below is a list of some videos we did at Drive. I can’t say how proud I am of the media guys, our contractors and everyone at North Point that helped play a part in putting these together. For the conference, the team created over 200 different media and design elements. Thank you so much for checking them out.

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.

DRIVE ‘10 is almost here! May 3-5

Brad — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:04:46 +0000

It’s extremely humbling to think that in just over a week, people from all over the world are coming to North Point for DRIVE 2010. I just want to be one of the first to say thank you. Here at North Point we certainly do not know everything there is about “doing church”. We do, however, love “being the church” God has called us to be. Over the past 15 years, we have learned a ton, prayed a ton, and yes, believe it or not, even failed a ton. Because of these rich experiences, we are excited to take what’s in our cup and pour it into yours. This year the main sessions with Andy are going to challenge you and encourage you like never before. Eddie Kirkland and I are doing a breakout together on how we utilize media and music during the worship service, plus lots of time for Q&A with the whole Service Programming team (but don’t be surprised if we ask a lot of questions about what YOU are doing). Our team can’t wait to meet everybody and talk media geek with you. See you at DRIVE 2010. (Also, for those of you not coming, the first session of Drive will be LIVE on North Point Online. Stay tuned for details.)

Drive Europe, Prague, Czech Republic (*POSTPONED)

Brad — Wed, 13 May 2009 12:47:13 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video. For those of you at Drive this year, we announced an exciting opportunity for North Point to bring DriveEurope to Prague! As a staff we are pumped to be able to invest in church leaders who are working and ministering all across Europe where only 2.4% of people consider themselves to be Christians. It is an incredible opportunity for North Point Ministries and specifically Global X, our missions area at North Point. More information will be available about how many of you can help sponsor a European church leader to attend DriveEurope. If you or anyone you know is working in Europe with your church, let them know that DriveEurope is coming.

EDIT: *DriveEurope has been postponed for the time being. We’ll have more details down the road as we find out more!

DJ Tanner Graphic from Drive ‘09

Brad — Tue, 12 May 2009 03:02:04 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.
One of the best decisions that was made at Drive ‘09 was having our very own Jarrett Stevens (DJ Tanner) spinning the records 30 minutes before the 3 main sessions began. Of course, he needed his own walk-in graphic. So of course we made him a little something. Special thanks to Nick Holloman from Black Sheep Boy for making the still logo.

Drive Title Package

Brad — Thu, 07 May 2009 14:10:55 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.
Long story short, the title package got changed the day before Drive. They were originally three minutes in length and ultimately landed at 47 seconds. Amber Blossom produced and Ryan Shove shot the footage. The concept was to do a different type of “man on the street”. If you have checked out 50 people, 1 question you’ll know what I mean. We asked where are you now in life, where do you want to go in life, and how do you want to get there. After putting it all together, the decision was made to not use it for Drive ‘09. I am SURE we will use it else-where in a service.

So instead, we took Ryan’s b-roll footage, found some different music and put together a VERY different piece than the original. Ryan is our video director at our Browns Bridge Campus and an AMAZING DP/videographer. He used a 35mm attachment to his Sony PMW-EX3 to get the shots.
After we decided not to use the original video, the piece was put together as a transition to Andy. We did some quick motion tracking in After effects on the text and ended it with a completely different application of the DRIVE logo than we had all conference long. After all was said and done, I was really happy with the way it turned out.