Friday I got to break out our shiny new Steadicam Merlin and use it in an actual real life shoot. The video features our good friend Josh Riebock. We’ll post the whole video when it’s done. In the meantime, Lee did a little (very low res) side by side comparison of the Steadicam shot we pulled off and a handheld shot of us pulling off the Steadicam shot. The Steadicam shot is on the left and that’s me operating the Steadicam, backing away from Josh, on the right. Notice how smooth the Steadicam shot is compared to a walking handheld shot. Pretty cool.

Easter is a big deal. Palm Sunday. Good Friday. Resurrection Sunday. These are seismic events in God’s redemptive storyline. Add to that the fact that tons of people who aren’t regularly in church are in church on Easter and you have a situation where, as a pastor or worship leader, you feel a great deal of pressure to deliver great services that powerfully reflect the Gospel of Christ. So what do you do?Using video in your Easter services certainly won’t solve all your problems, but church videos are what I know, and so I would like to give you a few reasons why I think using video can help to alleviate some of the pressure you feel to deliver powerfully at Easter.

Video…

1. Meets people where they are. You’ve heard it before but it’s worth repeating: We live in a visual culture. Incorporating video and other forms of visual media into your service will put people at ease, so they can settle in and prepare to hear the message. For example, starting the service with a funny clip is a great way to put the congregation at ease.

2. Connects emotionally. Video operates on an emotional level and provides you with a great tool for getting the congregation emotionally prepared to hear your message. Using a Sermon Illustration video is an excellent way to set up your message. The video you choose can illustrate one of your points, demonstrate a situation where people need to hear your message or raise questions that you can then deal with in your message.

3. Gives people space to reflect. Using video is also a great way to guide the congregation into a time of reflection and also helps focus them on the things you want them to reflect on. Use it to start the service to prepare their hearts for what they will hear. Use it during a special time in the service such as Communion to guide them through what you would have them reflecting on. Use it at the end of your message to give them space to think about and respond to what they’ve heard.

In all these ways and more, video provides you with a powerful tool to help do the most important thing at Easter” connect people to the life-changing message of Christ.

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.

We’ve been shooting a lot of people outdoors and on the fly lately. So I thought it might be helpful to offer some tips and thoughts on what I do to get good quality photos and video when I’m shooting outside in uncontrolled circumstances.1. If possible, shoot either in the morning or in the evening when the sun is not directly overhead. The harsh overhead light from the sun in the middle of the day makes for hard top light and ugly pictures and video.

2. Position the sun behind your subjects and not in front of them. If it’s really early in the morning or late in the evening and the sun is low, you might get some unwanted lens flare from this. Lens flare can be very cool, but if it’s not what you want, you should be able to position the sun behind and to the side of your subject to eliminate this problem. Or, you can always hold something like a piece of cardboard up and in front of your lens to block out the unwanted light. Putting the sun behind your subject gives you a great backlight which helps pop your subject out from the background and aids in giving the image more sense of depth. You should still have plenty of light on your subjects face to get a great picture.

To get an even better looking image, you can use a reflector (or some white foamcore board that you can buy at any art supply store) to bounce sunlight back onto your subjects face. These techniques will give you much better results than putting the bright sun at your back and right in your subjects face. Besides getting a much more appealing image, your subjects will be able to look at you or the camera without squinting!

3. When the sun is up overhead and you have to shoot, place your subjects in the shade and try to make sure the background in also shaded or dark. By keeping everything in the shade, you’ll have plenty of soft diffused light to get good images and you won’t have that harsh overhead sun casting terrible shadows under your subjects eyes and causing all kinds of contrast issues.

4. Try and create depth in the frame. Film and video are 2D, two dimensional. Filmmakers and Photographers create the perception of 3D by drawing your eye into the frame. They accomplish this through the use of depth. A background that draws your eye deep into the frame gives the illusion of three dimensions. If you place your subject right up against a wall, it flattens the frame and highlights a 2D feel.

I pulled the following photo from my library. It’s a photo I snapped of my family a couple of years ago. It’s not a perfect picture by any stretch but the circumstances under which it was taken make for a good illustration here:
The photo was taken out in the open, in direct sunlight at about three o’clock in the afternoon. By placing the sun behind my subjects as best I could, I was able to accomplish a couple of things. Even though the light is somewhat top heavy because of the time of day, I was able to give them a nice backlight, which helps them look pretty and pops them out from the background. And, maybe more importantly, I was able to get my kids to have their eyes open in the picture. Move the sun in front of everyone and they’re squinting into the light and you don’t have anything but a harsh, flat front light on them and big ugly shadows cast from their eyes, their noses, etc. In a perfect world this would have been taken later in the day and I would have had an assistant there to position a reflector to bounce some nice, soft fill light into the subject’s faces. But it’s not a perfect world and we often don’t work under anything near perfect circumstances. When you’re running and gunning as we all so often are, you’ve got to work hard to do the best you can with what you’ve got.

Let me know if you find these tips useful or if you have any questions about them. I would be happy to answer any questions or debate people on the subject :).

I’ve had some feedback that folks reading our blog would like some more information on editing. If you’re an editor or are interested in editing, I wanted to point you to a blog that Lee and I try to keep up with. It’s called The Editblog (click here to jump to it).

The Editblog keeps up with all the latest updates to programs like Final Cut Pro, Premiere and Avid (all the professional editing apps). It also points out good places to see film and video clips on the internet and handy little applications like the cool little widget posted about today:

VideoSpace is a dashboard widget from the good folks at Digital Heaven. According to the Digital Heaven Freeware section it is:

“a free widget for Mac OS X Tiger which calculates the disk space required for a given duration, codec, frame rate and audio setting. It works in both directions so you can calculate time to space or space to time as indicated by the direction of the arrow between the two input areas.”

And one of my favorite recent posts points you to where you can check out some of cinema’s most famous long takes:

If you are looking to kill some time this weekend the check out The Long Take post over at the Daily Film Dose. They’ve put together a huge collection (thanks to You Tube) of some of the “greatest long tracking shots in cinema.”

There may be some questionable content in these clips. I didn’t have a chance to watch them all. But you can definitely learn a lot by watching long takes done by some of cinema’s greatest storytellers. My personal favorite is the shot from Goodfellas. I know it’s a really violent film, but the shot they’ve chosen is one I’ve studied in film school and in a Steadicam workshop I attended in CA. It’s one of the most famous shots ever committed to film. Watch the shot and check out how much is conveyed about the character played by Ray Liotta by this single take. I’ve embedded the clip from Youtube below. Magic.

For those of you on the feedreader, here’s the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=666F4QWgjpU

I’d love to hear what you think about the Editblog and let me know what your favorite long take is.

Storme blogged the other day about the copyright law podcast done by Creative Synergy Podcast. I listened to the entire podcast (about 1 hour) and it is extremely informative. From my perspective as a long time media volunteer, the issues discussed are very enlightening and somewhat disturbing. Anthony Coppedge and Greg Atkinson invited 2 copyright lawyers and the President of the Church Copyright Administration to discuss this very hot topic in churches. I realized that there were things I did as a part of the media team that were just outright illegal. I knew some of the issues and had the same feeling that Greg and Anthony discuss, but some were new to me.

If you are involved in any form or fashion with a church in media, music, arts, programming etc. then this podcast is an absolute must hear. The way they approach the topic, from Scripture’s perspective and then dive into what our country’s law says is very encouraging. Basically, we as Christ followers, must be above reproach in regards to all matters, not just ones of convenience or of seemingly “big” sins.

Three big ideas that jumped out to me personally:
1. Stealing is stealing and many churches don’t know or don’t care that they are infringing upon copyright laws in video/film, music and dramas.
2. YOU are liable for any law that is broken, not the church.
3. 1 Timothy 5:18

If you haven’t had the chance to listen to this podcast, I really encourage you to do so. You will be very thankful that you did. Click here to download it now.

Lee

I’ve done a terrible job on the blog front this week. Our time here at eleven72 has been consumed this week with the hurculean effort of finishing up a twenty minute industrial video that we were hired to do. It’s good to finally have that off the plate and to be able to sit down with y’all (yes, I said y’all. we’re in Texas here and that’s how we roll).

By way of making up for a lack of interesting posts this week on our blog, I wanted to mention a few of the very cool things I’ve seen around the blogosphere lately (sure I’m working hard, but I’ve always got time for the net, right?). Anyway, here are some notes from my reader:

Greg Atkinson at Church Video Ideas posted a link to this site where the Passion folks are giving away some great worship tracks as their way of offering up hope for all the people struggling through the darkness reverberating from the terrible events that took place at Virginia Tech. You can see and download those tracks here.

Jott to Self

Have you heard of Jott? I heard about this one from Greg Davis on his blog Technically Speaking. Man, this Jott thing is really cool. I just signed up. From your cell phone, you can call Jott and leave a message for either yourself or one of your contacts. Then Jott transcribes that message and emails it to you or whoever you want it emailed too (emails it as text!). Check out their website for details. I’m looking forward to Jotting.

This is a new blog I read about on Church Video Ideas. I checked it out and it looks like it’s going to be a fantastic resource for any of you out there who are in the trenches pulling off church services week in, week out. There was a great post on there a few days ago about using mics in your services and having back ups for your back ups. Brian Davis really seems to know his stuff and this looks like it will be a blog full of really good, practical, useful advice. Check it out here.

If you’re a Gmail user, you should check out this Better Gmail extension that you can add if you use Firefox. I read about this on Lifehacker and I’m using it now. It does some really cool things like lets you save searches, has a filter assistant, gives you label colors, lets you preview conversations in your inbox and more. Read about it here on Lifehacker. The post includes instructions on how to download it.

Well that’s what’s happening in my corner of the blogosphere. I’d love to hear what you’re reading. Leave some comments and we’ll check out your favorite blogs and haunts.