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

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.

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).

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?

The visual direction for the series came from a vague idea we got from a magazine cover. Many times during the creative process, we’ll just grab a ton of magazines and start tearing out whatever images seem to fit the topic of the series. Everyone in the meeting identified with this image. The thought was that a person would be holding a box containing all the religious symbols in his life. As if he was getting rid of all the religion in his life.

From here we thought it would have more impact if we saw more people getting rid of their religion, and the final key-art would be more impactful if there were a variety of symbols in the box showing all sorts of religions. So, we went away from a single person and decided to have the title package show lots of people.

There were a few big hurdles in finding the exact direction for the final look. These discussions included… “Should the symbols be in a trash can? If they are in the trash, does that say we are throwing away religion? Should people be in a line? Should it be filmed in a studio? Should it be on a street corner? Should it be in a box? Should the box be cardboard? Are any religious symbols off limits?” It was really awesome watching everyone get involved in this conversation, and I think it led to an amazing place.

Promotion (written by Brad)
As we were trying to settle on the best creative direction Mike mentions above, there was the promo that was needed ASAP (ever been in that situation??) There were a lot of directions we could go, but until we figured that out, we needed tension without alienating other religions. So, we decided to draw attention to a specific religious, everyday symbol used by Christians. The emotion that is felt when somebody has a FISH sticker on a car rubs people all sorts of ways. For us, we wanted the character to have a little self-evaluation moment with his decision of having a fish sticker and, ultimately, for whatever reason, choosing to forgo it. The font (which was initially chosen as a placeholder) and music continued through to the final look. Click here to view the embedded video.

Overall Look

For the overall look we decided to go with a grungy city alleyway. The box would be cardboard. This was to give an overall feel of being discarded, but not thrown away (thus not being overly disrespectful of the new attendee’s current religion).

Also, we wanted to give everything a feel that I referred to as “vintage-feeling,” heavily processed photography. Kind of like Holga camera, or cross-processed photography. Some great examples of this can be found in Brian Manley’s portfolio, an amazing Atlanta designer and photographer. To achieve these effects that are often done in camera, we used some “Totally Rad” Photoshop filters available at TotallyRAD!

These filters will change your life if you’re a photographer.

One of the things that drew us to this look was what I call “intentional unintentionality.” Meaning, the picture is composed well, but appears to be a haphazard, quick, nearly unintentional shot. So we decided on a bit of unusual cropping and slightly rotating everything.

Title Package

Lastly, the title package was done in-house by Josh Peters (Buckhead Media), Dave Blakeslee (North Point Media), Brian Korosec (Browns Bridge production), myself (North Point Media), and a host of extras. Josh did a great job shooting this with a Canon Mark II 5D–a still SLR digital camera that has HD video ability. We chose this camera because it gives us a great depth-of-field range on the shoot. We wanted to have a very shallow focus depth for lots of control over the audience’s attention during the piece. We wanted to make sure they saw exactly what we wanted them to see. It also allowed for more tension, beauty, and personality. Click here to view the embedded video.

****************EDIT 8/25/09: Here is Part 3 (FINALLY) for those of you who asked–I totally blanked and forgot to post it as a follow up to this post last month. Since we are SO late in the game posting for this series, I am editing this old post directly with the new video addition.  Sorry for leaving you guys in “the waiting room” for this video!  Hope you enjoy this little hidden blog nugget ****************

Creative Director:  Josh Peters
Producer:  David Blakeslee
Writer:  Adam Dukes
Director:  Adam Dukes & Josh Peters
Editor:  Josh Peters
Sound Design:  Lane Johnson
Casting:  Heather Breslin
Camera (DP):  Josh McKague
Key Grip/Audio:  Brian Little
Video Assistant/ Grip:  Nathan Boyd