The Making of "That's My Church"

Several people have asked me about the creation of a sermon bumper I produced for the "Pinelake Inside Out" sermon series. So here's the deal... sometimes, you see an idea, a concept, or video, and its perfect for what you want to accomplish. "Pinelake Inside Out" was a sermon series about the identity of our church, so we wanted a sermon bumper showcasing different people in the church and describing what our church was all about. So we did a little research and came across this video:

So, I just decided to rip of what Central Films had done. Sometimes you just have to say, "that's a great concept, let's do our version of that". So we did.

HOW I WROTE IT: I scripted out the lines I wanted read. I stole a line or two from Central Films, but for the most part, I wrote lines I thought would fit for our church. Our senior pastor doesn't give us much ahead of time as far as sermon notes or points, but he did happen to give us a few notes on this series. So I took some of the exact words from his notes and placed them in my script. If you know the pastor is going to say the words "we send people" for example, I use those exact words in my script- it makes for a nice flow and hand off to the sermon. For the rest of the script I used the ideas and themes in his sermon notes to get at some of the concepts we would be discussing in that series.

HOW I SHOT IT: We hung white sheets on two light poles and blasted it with light. I had my lines scripted out and scheduled as many people as I could find to read them on camera. I didn't want it to sound scripted so I would give them a line, have the person read it the way I wrote it, and then we would play around with the line with whatever was comfortable to them. I did have to coach them. For example, the black man, Paul who opens and closes the piece- I asked him if he had any grandchildren. He said he did, so I told him to say the line "let me tell you about my church" as if he was talking to his grandkids- the first take after that was great- he motions his hands a little and I got a slight grin out of him. I shoot a lot of tape, which can take me a while to edit, but I think it's worth it to have more stuff to work with. I had every person read every line I wrote. I had several people that I shot that did not make the final cut.

Here is what the piece looked like after I edited the best takes down, before I added graphics and music:

HOW I EDITED IT: I cut the piece in Final Cut. Then I exported a quicktime out of Final Cut and imported it into AfterEffects. Once in AfterEffects, I keyed out everything white- so the background went away. Then I added a white solid and placed it underneath the quicktime footage. This allowed me to add text between the white solid and the quicktime footage- this is why you can see some of the text behind the people on screen. This also allowed me to move the subject anywhere I wanted to on screen. Now, the ending tag was a little tricky. I was given a vector image created by one of our graphic designers- made up of different words that formed the word "Pinelake". I masked out several of these small words at a time and made new words pop in when a different person appeared on screen. I created these 'masked' layers in AfterEffects then created a new composition and placed all of the 'masked' layers in it. Then I enabled each layer "3D" and added a camera move to the composition. Then I laid my quicktime footage on top of this composition.

I then exported a quicktime to an instrumentalist we have on staff who had time to compose some original music for the piece! I found a music piece on KillerTracks.com- and I almost bought it, but it would have been close to $500 for the rights to the track. So I let Chris Schopmeyer listen to the track to get an idea of the style and tempo I was looking for. He did a great job!

I was really pleased with how this piece came out. It is one of my favorite pieces. It was great to take on the challenge of replicating an idea and adapting it for our church.

Here is the completed piece: