That’s me with a couple of the stars of our newest Mother’s Day video. We shot all day today and it went well. It’s all “in the can” so to speak or in this case on the cards (P2). The video is a fun salute to Moms and visually highlights the many roles that a mom plays throughout the day. I won’t give it all away right now… We should have it posted some time next week. In the meantime, enjoy this brief look behind the scenes of an eleven72 video shoot:

Recently we’ve had the un-pleasure of mentally fighting back with potential customers of ours on the premise of price vs. value. This debate has been going on since I can remember, but we just got a comment from a pastor about our brand new New Year’s Video called This Year. He says it was a “Good message, well done, but at 50 cents per second, way to expensive.” It’s a high end, TV commercial style sermon illustration that is only 0:44 seconds long and we’re charging $20 (as we do with every sermon illustration). One of the big problems with this kind of thinking is we don’t spend any less time or money on something because it ends up being shorter. In other words, we spend roughly the same amount of money and invest the same amount of time on something whether it ends up being 30 seconds or five minutes (And I promise you all that we are not in this to get rich but to serve God… you can check out our books :). Our intent with “This Year” was to make a very tight, powerful video that could be used by pastors to set up a great message about the coming year. A tongue and cheek style simple short for New Years that pastors can take in a lot of different directions.This issue of Price vs. Value has become a big issue within the filmmaking community…the church filmmaking community that is. I personally see an enormous divide between the price of a product/service and the value of said product/service. Others I guess don’t see it that way. Chuck Brady, from the online publication, Bizcovering, says “In simple terms price is the same as affordability. It comes down to whether or not your prospect has the means to pay for your product or service. Value on the other hand comes down to whether or not your customer thinks your product is worth the money.”

So, if the folks on the price per second side of the isle are right, and it really does come down to value for the length of the product, then that means you MUST get more value for your $8.50 movie ticket to go see Transformers (run time of 2 hours and 15 minutes) than for your ticket to the 2005 Academy Award winning movie Crash (run time of only 1 hour and 47 minutes). Maybe you did like Transformers more, but was it because it was longer? Was Crash a worse movie or worth less at the ticket window because it was shorter?

Again, our heart in all of this is to serve God and His Church with our gifts. Not to gouge churches for money by overcharging for Sermon Illustrations. I know there are a lot of churches out there barely scraping by, but so are we, and we’re all in this together, right?

Love to hear what you think. Post it. Email it. Blog it.

There are a lot of good, high quality church videos to be had out there. But sometimes there is no substitute for telling the stories of what God is doing in your home congregation. Video testimonies/interviews can be a great way to tell those stories. Here are some tips and things to think about to help you get the best results shooting interviews.

1. Don’t Use the Camera Mic. The Camera Mic is terrible. Forget about it. You should never use the camera mic for interview audio. Your first choice should be to use a lavalier microphone, wired or wireless is fine, whatever you can get your hands on. Secure the transmitter on your subjects pants or belt and run the mic cable up under your subjects shirt to hide it. Then clip the lav on their shirt, test and adjust your audio levels and your ready to rock. If you don’t have access to a lav mic, use a shotgun mic. Aim the shotgun mic at your subject, get it as close to them as possible and test and adjust your levels. As a last resort, you could set up a mic on a stand and place it on a table or something like that to interview your subject. It might look a little odd, but I promise looking odd is better than getting poor quality audio. And please don’t tell me you’ll fix it in Post. Lastly, always use headphones to make sure you’re getting good audio. Just looking at the levels isn’t enough, because the levels don’t tell the whole story. That loud air conditioning unit or bug chirping isn’t going to peg your levels, but it is going to be annoying on your audio track.

2. Lighting is important. A technique called Three Point Lighting is the foundation of all film and video lighting. If you don’t know what it is, check out this brief tutorial at mediacollege.com. You won’t always need or have all three lights, but knowing what they are and how they work will give you the foundation you need to think about and talk about proper lighting. Here are some quick tips to help you in the trenches:

• Avoid placing your subjects in front of window or sliding doors. Unless you have a Hollywood lighting package, it’s really hard to compete with the sun.
• Use soft light. Soft light makes everything look better. Your subjects will thank you. If you’re using a film video lighting kit, try putting some diffusion in front of the lens. You can buy diffusion in the form of gels (hit this link if you have no idea what gels are) from most photo/video stores. Diffusion spreads out hard light and softens it. For a great low cost soft light, you can use Chinese Lanterns or Paper Lanterns. They use household bulbs and you can find them for a few bucks at places like IKEA or order them online. Some Hollywood cinematographers actually prefer and use these low cost lanterns to light their films. Alternately, you can bounce film/video lights off a white surface to spread and soften the light. Point your lights at a wall or ceiling or pick up some white foam core at an arts and crafts store.
• Place a house or practical light in the background. This looks nice, creates a sense of 3D space and provides a backlight to give some added definition to your subject.

3. Focus and Exposure. Don’t trust the flip screen for focus and exposure. If you do, you’ll get burned, especially when you’re shooting in a particularly bright environment where the sun obliterates the image on the flip screen. Use the flip screen for framing, shoot with it open, but don’t trust it for focus and exposure. For focus and exposure, you would ideally use a properly calibrated professional video monitor located in a light controlled environment (read a black tent) and operated by a professional engineer. But this is the real world and you work for a church. Unless that church is Willowcreek, you probably don’t have a professional field monitor. So… Use the viewfinder. Close the flipscreen, zoom all the way in on your subjects face, preferably eyes, focus, adjust exposure and then zoom back out and find your frame. Then, open your flip screen, get comfortable and you’re ready to rock and roll.

4. Check your footage after the first take or two. It is a good practice to shoot a little and then check and make sure you’re getting good audio and video. I was just shooting an interview the other day and, after the first question was answered, I rolled back and checked the video. Much to my dismay, the image was completely pixelated and the audio sounded like an alien signal in a Sci-Fi flick. Luckily, we hadn’t shot the entire half hour interview and returned to edit it only to find it entirely unuseable. We made some adjustments, replugged some connections and tested it again. It worked the second time and it was smooth sailing from there. Check it. But, if you check takes after shooting for a while, always remember to que the tape back up to the end. Otherwise, you’re going to be surprised and upset to find some shots missing in the editing room.

So, with a little bit of care and some basic equipment, you can shoot great interviews in house. If you have any questions about any of this or ideas or thoughts, feel free to comment. I’d love to keep this conversation going.

Shooting the Better Off Rock’d show made me remember how much I want to do another music video. I worked on a couple of videos for a band called Slider’s Fault a while back. Here’s one I Directed. I’d love to know what you think. I’m looking forward to a time when I get to Direct my next one :). If you’ve Directed or crewed on a music video or have a favorite, send me a link so I can check it out. In the meantime, enjoy Last Call For Sympathy by Sliders Fault:

Here’s a link for feed readers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2PqJs-6nIw

So… I saw a video this morning on a certain distributors website which shall remain nameless. The video is a “Christianized” copy of a video put out by the ONE campaign. The ONE campaign video uses highly recognizeable faces and a stark black and white aesthetic to draw attention to the startling statistic that a child dies every three seconds from AIDS or extreme poverty. The video is really well done, highly creative and very effective in communicating its message. Click here to watch it now.

Imagine my surprise when I’m looking through the new releases on a certain website and I come across a video that is an exact copy of this video. It’s black and white, shot on a white background, the people in the video aren’t the same celebrities but they are snapping every three seconds. Then the text comes up and it’s been changed to reflect that every three seconds (same as in the ONE video) six people die. The point the video is trying to make is that people are dying every second and a lot of those people don’t know Christ as Savior. I get that. And I applaud the filmmakers for trying to make that point. I just wish they would have taken inspiration from the ONE video and used that inspiration to creatively come up with their own original idea. As it is, to me it seems they’ve just stolen the idea. They give no credit to the original creators and they are passing it off as an original work. I could go on but I think I’ve made my point.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this in the church video space. It’s one of the most blatant copies I’ve seen, but it’s not the first. We need to be innovators. We need to be drawing on the creativity that God has given us to come up with original and powerful ways to communicate truth. And we need to be above reproach. There is a difference between parody and stealing. There is a difference between homage and rip off. And it just seems wrong.

I would really love it if you guys would weigh in on this topic and let me know your thoughts. I really feel like this is a discussion we all need to be having as makers and users of media and most importantly as bearers of the image of Christ.

My Friendship Connection

I am fired up. I had a great conversation yesterday with a guy named Vernon Brady who used to be the Vice President of the Church Growth Institute. He’s spearheading an evangelism initiative called My Friendship Connection. And here’s the awesome part for us: He wants eleven72 to help produce a series of videos for this oh so cool event (more on the event itself in a second). First a little background: Did you know that according to research done by the Church Growth Institute a full 86% of the people who trust Christ as their Savior do so because of the simple invitation of a friend. By way of contrast, only 2% come to Christ through the use of advertising. Wow. That is an amazing stat. The single most effective way to evangelize the people you know is to simply invite them to church. We didn’t realize that the idea behind our video Just Ask was such a powerful one! But it makes sense when you think about it, because God is all about relationship.

Twenty years ago, Vernon was part of a program called Friend Day. The program, asking people to invite a friend to church, was used successfully by 47,000 churches. Since then, God has been growing up in Vernon a desire to see millions of people’s lives forever changed through nothing more than being invited to church (and, of course, being reached by the Spirit and prompted to turn their lives over to Jesus). And the time is now. The seed that God planted with Vernon is poised to start a flood with My Friendship Connection.

What is My Friendship Connection?

My Friendship Connection is a strategy designed to mobilize your church for a great day of outreach. Synergy comes by connecting churches across North America on the same day with a single focus. Therefore, we seek to engage the masses into the largest army ever assembled for the purpose of reaching, evangelizing and winning friends to Jesus Christ through the local church.

Go to their website and check it out. Tell your church about it. Right now about 500 churches in Virginia are on board, but that number is quickly growing. They’ve had inquiries from other countries and big groups like the Southern Baptist Convention and the North American Mission Board are expressing interest. Just hearing about it, I could tell that God is in this. Imagine what might happen if tens of thousands of churches get involved with this in the next few months. Imagine all the people who will walk through the door of a church on November 4th (that’s the day when all of this culminates). My friends. Your friends. Tens of thousands of people. Imagine all the people who will come face to face with the life changing reality of Jesus Christ. What a great day for rejoicing that will be! All because friends simply asked their friends, “would you come to church with me?

I’m so excited that God brought this to Lee and I. So humbled that we might be used to serve God’s Kingdom in such a powerful way. I have never met Vernon Brady face to face. We connected because of our media on the internet. He could have called anyone. He called us. God continues to amaze me daily. This life of following Christ is truly a great adventure.

I’ll have more to post on this as things progress. For now, check out myfriendshipconnection.com. And get ready friends!

We had a reader send us a request for more posts/information on the how to of editing. How do you edit? That’s a really big question. The answer is simple and complicated all at the same time.

Editing in film or video is sequencing images or clips into a timeline. Choosing to place one moving clip after another in a certain order. In the end, editing is story telling. I had an editing professor who said the editor is the person who tells the joke. Someone thinks up the joke. Someone writes it. Someone records and/or captures it. And then the editor decides how it should be told.

One of the most eye opening assignments I had in film school was to edit together a scene from raw footage of the TV show Highlander. Anyone remember that show? Adrian Paul as Duncan MacLeod? Anyone? It wasn’t a very good show, but I’m getting way off point. Everyone in the class was given the same raw footage to work with. We all spent a couple of weeks working on our cuts. And then we watched them together. Same footage. Totally different scenes. Everyone in the class told a totally different joke.

And so… You can learn how to push the right buttons, how this software works and that software works. And you can debate the merits of Final Cut Pro vs. Avid vs. Premiere. But before you get into any of that, if you want to be an editor, you need to study and think and watch and decide how you want to tell your jokes. Anyone can learn how to cut images into a sequence, but it takes a lifetime to learn where to place those cuts in order to have the impact you want. Every frame counts. Every moment matters. Where should you cut?

There’s an excellent documentary about editing called “The Cutting Edge - The Magic of Movie Editing.” It’s a feature length documentary about the art and craft of film editing. You can order a DVD copy through Amazon. It was recently available online through Google video but it seems it’s been taken down. I’ll let you know if I find it somewhere. I also highly recommend Walter Murch’s book “In the Blink of an Eye,” also available through Amazon and other fine book stores. In the Blink of an Eye is the best book I’ve ever read about the philosophy or thought process that goes in to editing. Walter Murch is a long time editor for Francis Ford Coppola and edited, among other things, The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. More recently, he was the editor on Cold Mountain, one of the first big budget features to be cut entirely with Final Cut Pro.

We’ll post more on editing in the near future (something more hands on and practical :).