Price vs. Value

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.

Tips For Outdoor Videography/Photography

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 :).

Two Great Short Films

Check out these shorts by Hallmark. The cinematography, acting, writing, direction. Man these are good. I want to be able to pull of shorts like this, to tell stories this well, to move people this much in our space. Man.





If you're reading this on a feed, here are the links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRX7tdh1Ww4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-rMgkctHPo

These are two of my favorites, but you can find lots of these great Hallmark spots on YouTube.

Back to the old drawing board.