Media

You guys may already have this as it’s been out for a while now, but if you didn’t know, VideoCopilot.net released a Reflection plugin for After Effects that is absolutely phenomenal, easy to use, and FREE.

Video Copilot’s Reflection Plug-in

If you’re like me, you’ve spent a miserable amount of design time duplicating your layers, flipping them vertically, and messing with masks/blurs/opacity to emulate that popular reflected look in your videos, which has quickly become a staple in modern graphic design.  This plugin shrinks that process down to a few clicks, without having to mess with comp duplicates or layer parenting, etc.  It’s also very customizable.  If you’re an AE nerd like myself, this is actually a VERY big deal.  Enjoy!

On January 3rd we started the new year with a bang! Especially in the TenBefore. Nathan Boyd (one of our amazing interns) built a project in After Effects that included a little fireworks! Best thing about it is we can make future changes with ease so when we want to celebrate winter or spring we can do it with ease. I absolutely love it when we can highlight something that is a common emotion, like New Year’s, for everyone in the audience. For now, check out the 1st TenBefore of 2010 plus Trip and Tyler’s new years REVOLUTIONS. Hope you had a great start to 2010.
http://www.vimeo.com/8637774

On December 20th, the Service Programming teams (and I do mean TEAMS) of North Point Community Church, Browns Bridge Community Church, and Buckhead Church pulled off an amazing Christmas opener. From an internal perspective, the collaboration and cooperation that happened between the Music and Production teams of these campuses was incredibly rewarding to be a part of. Please make sure you read the whole post to see the people and positions involved. Go to www.NPCCproduction.com to check it out.

We wanted to take today and just say thanks for visiting the blog, thanks for saying hi, and a very special thanks for all you do in your little corner of the world with media. You have no idea what heart, or life you are changing and in what way. What you do makes a difference. Be encouraged. Blessings from all of us…

http://www.vimeo.com/8205736 Hey Everybody, North Point just released “AWAKE”, our live worship album that was recorded in August of this year. I am not gonna lie to you, it’s pretty amazing. Yes, I am biased but trust me these songs will stick on your soul in a good way. If you don’t believe me, well, here is your chance to get one for free. First FIVE people that comment on this post saying they want one - will get one. HURRY. You can also buy it on iTunes or at northpointmusic.com

The Resources department at North Point treated our team to lunch today to thank us for some extra work we’ve done with them over the past few months.  As if we could be any more thankful for our jobs, Suzy Gray and her team decided to celebrate the wins of the past couple months with a surprise gesture of gratitude and encouragement, and they took the time to share some really cool stories of people who’ve had their lives changed in small part because of what we get to do on a weekly basis.  It’s that kind of celebration that motivates us to continue giving our all to our work and supporting the other departments of the church with everything that we have.  They didn’t have to buy us lunch and we certainly didn’t expect it of them, but it spoke volumes about the staff culture we’re blessed to be a part of:  A culture of encouragement and celebration.

I just wanted to take a second today, in the midst of the inevitable evaluations and service critiques you are all experiencing post-Sunday, to encourage you guys to pause and celebrate what God is accomplishing through you in your town/city, etc.  (I know you’ve got a busy week, but it doesn’t take long to tell someone on your team, “job well done”.)  It’s vital to realize just how significant what you’re doing is, even if it’s just mashing buttons and compressing videos.  In a very small way, you are leading people to Christ with the work that you do, and truly, from an EXCELLENCE standpoint, you don’t realize just how amazing you all are at your jobs.  You are SO brilliant and resourceful, I hope you stop to celebrate that.  Not in a prideful way, but in a way that helps you realize how significant of a role you’re playing in this generation.

Just take a brief look outside your church one day for comparison’s sake to see what I mean.  If you take the average tech-savvy contemporary church of 200 or so–and juxtapose that with the average concert venue of 200–the higher production value is often hands down at the church.  I’m not saying this to brag about the modern church or to knock small club/concert venues, but to encourage you to stop and appreciate what each of you are accomplishing on a weekly basis from a purely technical perspective.  Not as compared to some other church with more or less money, but as compared to a real-world venue that parallels yours in size and resources.  Think about the last modest club/concert venue you went to:  feedback in the PA, muddy acoustics, dim lighting, and don’t even think about video screens or graphics…and it was a permanent installation, right?  Same amount of seats, less compelling environment, and they are charging for it.  Many of you guys, on the other hand, are portable churches with passionate volunteers who set up A/V rigs from scratch every week with screens, lighting, motion graphics, bulletins/logos and full on branding strategies, and your sound guy has WAY more knowledge of signal flow & EQ than attenders could ever appreciate, all with limited resources.  If culture is any indication, the majority of you church media types are incredible at what you do and you don’t even know it.

I hope somebody on your team is pausing enough to celebrate that reality with you.

If you are one of those solo jack-of-all-trades guys who is responsible for ALL of the editing, preproduction, tech directing, audio, lighting, volunteer coordination, and live production at your church…we salute and admire you guys like you wouldn’t believe.  Just know that you guys are heroes to us with the proportion of results you achieve. Each weekend, you hold your head down and work twice as hard as most larger teams, with a level of expectation being placed on your shoulders that far surpasses what your budget and manpower allows.  Each weekend, you are accomplishing more than could or should ever be expected of only one or two people. Each weekend, you are blowing similarly sized concert venues out of the water with your production & media excellence.  Each weekend, you achieve a near miracle by creating church environments that unchurched people love to attend, with extremely limited resources and time.  Though you may not hear or feel it very often, just know that your work is not in vain.

Take a second to breathe, look at how far you’ve come, appreciate the people who are coming to Christ at your church regardless of your most recent missed lighting/mic/video cue…and CELEBRATE that!  I promise you, this is not the same as bragging about your accomplishments or “settling” for less than the best.  You can evaluate your need to get better and celebrate what God is doing through you all at the same time.  Encouragement is a huge and vital motivator for so many people, myself included.  Celebrate what you’re doing, regardless of the size or scope, and let your love for those outside the church motivate your ambition to improve it week after week.  You ARE making a difference–remember that.  Celebrate!

I am a video guy at heart and I could talk about video cameras for hours.  When our creative team decided that “Velma’s Diner” should be a sitcom style shoot it brought up a unique opportunity to put our hands on some video gear that we don’t normally get a chance to use.

Enter Steve Thomason and High Definition Events. Steve did an outstanding job of partnering with us and delivering a portable video rig that was perfect for our situation.  We used 4 Panasonic HPX500 studio configured cameras on the Velma’s shoot.  These cameras allowed us to record isolated footage at the camera onto P2 cards as well as in our temporary control room from a switcher.  Steve supplied the HS400 multi format switcher as well as a P2 recorder for a live P2 capture of the switchers video feed.  That unit was the HPM200.

When it came to video format we decided to shoot HD in 720P in 60 frame mode.  Stylistically this kept the sitcom looking very ‘live’ and not overly theatrical. For camera positioning we affixed one camera on a small dolly, one camera on a portable field jib and the final two cameras were on fixed tripods. This set up gave us a tremendous amount of flexibility to move our camera positioning on the fly.

Ultimately it has been a great learning experience and the huge number of people involved in this project have been amazing to work with.  Have you guys ever shot anything sitcom-style?  What have you learned along the way?

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. It needs to symbolize the tension of the series — “God uses the most unlikely people to fulfill his promises”
2. We wanted it to look “Christmasy.” Once it is on a resource center shelf it should be quickly recognized as Christmas.
3. We needed a look that would work for the series AND our title package. (more details below)
4. We wanted to do all this while still keeping in mind our 4 main objectives when designing a series:

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?

In January of ‘08, North Point launched a YouTube channel in order to reach out to the video sharing community. The initial thought was to upload 15-20 minute video segments from selected message series for people out there who may not step foot into a church–it generated some great discussions, and we uploaded a good bit of letterboxed content to the then 4:3 Youtube.

Windowbox effect on older videos

Recently, however, YouTube has switched over to 16:9 and has added a limit of 10 minutes to all new videos. That put us in a bit of a bind because we don’t want to sacrifice the existing “extended” content & comments/discussions we have up there, but at the same time we ‘d need to recompress everything to make the content look as good as possible.  Because of the switchover, many of our older videos are now both pillar-boxed and letter-boxed…the dreaded “windowboxing” effect.

New native 16:9 compression

Until we figure out the best way to update the older content, this is where we stand: Compressing all our newer videos in 10-minute intervals with a new setting to fill the player natively at 16:9.  Despite the issues with the older files, we’re thankful for YouTube’s new system as it’s way more flattering to our widescreen content.

Do any of you anyone upload content to YouTube? What settings / compressions have you found to work well?