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.

Top Ten Most Flattering Portrayals of Christians in Film

Brett McCraken, a grad student at UCLA who writes film reviews and such for Relevant Magazine and Christianity Today has a blog up and running called The Search. It looks to be a very promising blog. On it, he's posted a list of what he considers the Top Ten Most Flattering Portrayals of Christians in Film. My favorite film on the list is #9. But I've only seen two films on the list, so it looks like I've got some homework to do. Click here to check out the list.

The Editblog

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.

The Cutting Edge

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 :).

What Does That Look Like? Using Movie Clips to Make Your Point

We all know that movies can be powerful. And we all know that movies are huge cultural influencers. Because of that, we can use clips and scenes from movies to help our audiences see or get a mental picture of what we're talking about in our messages.

This last week, our Pastor showed a clip from Ice Age, the animated film that featured Ray Romano as one of the last Mammoths on earth. He showed a scene from the movie where a squirrel chases an elusive acorn. The squirrel just keeps chasing the acorn and he can't ever quite seem to get it. On the surface, it's just a simple, silly clip. The congregation loved it, laughed at it, and was entertained by it. The fact that it was simple and funny made it easy to remember. This made the clip sticky (more about "sticky" here) and, when attached to the Pastor's message, made his point stick.

The message was the first in a series called Ka-Ching-Enomics. The series contrasts God's Economy with the world's economy. Here's how the pastor set up and came out of the clip:

Pastor:

We live in a world that lies to us about reality. And the foundation of worldwide ka-ching-enomic theory is this falsehood known as If Only. "If only I could be that, if only I could do this, if only I could obtain that, then I’d be happy. It would be enough. I’d be full. There’d be contentment in my life." Watch this clip:

This is where he played the clip and then this is how he came out of it:

Did you ever feel like that squirrel? There’s this acorn and it’s so good that you can smell it but you can’t quite grasp a hold of it. Well, our story begins today not with a prehistoric nut but with a prehistoric fruit.

Then he went on to read from Genesis and talk about how the evil one sets us up just like he set up Adam and Eve. "Hey, if you just do this, you'll be happy. If only..." And for the rest of the sermon he could refer to that acorn and we knew what he was talking about and we knew how we can sometimes be just like that squirrel chasing that nut. It was so simple. And it worked so well.

The sermon was preached by Ted Beasley at Gateway Church here in Austin. If you're interested in hearing how he set up and wove the metaphor of the clip into his entire sermon, you can listen to his sermon here.

Sermon Illustrations, like the ones you can find here at eleven72.com and clips from popular movies can be such a powerful addition to your sermon. The power comes from how you tie the clip to your message. Set up the clip. Show the clip. And then tell your people what it means. This will give them a visual picture to attach to your message and that visual picture will help make the message stick.

If you're looking to use a clip or scene from a popular film, here are some great resources to help you find what you're looking for:

CVLI.org - A license from Christian Video Licensing International, just like CCLI for music, gives you the right to show clips from thousands of movies, including movies from a lot of the big studios, in your services and Sunday school classes. With the license everything is on the up and up as far as copyright is concerned and all that. To learn more visit the CVLI website.

Textweek - Textweek has a Movie Concordance that has movies indexed by title as well as theme. Along with the title of each movie, you'll find a brief synopsis of how the movie or clip mentioned ties into a biblical theme. Textweek was my first stop when I was the Media Director at Gateway Church. While you're on the site, check out their other resources like their Scripture Index, their Art Index and their Resources For Use in Times of Terrorism and War. You can find it all here.

IMDB.com - The Internet Movie Database a great site for mining information on movies. Who made them. Who's in them(shameless plug- I'm even listed in there). For our purposes here, IMDB is great because there is a drop down menu that let's you search specifically for Quotes and Plots. So if you know that you're preaching about X or you need a clip where a character talks about Y, you simply select the appropriate search criteria from the drop down menu and then type whatever you need into the search field and up comes a list of movies with the plots or quotes you're looking for. It's awesome. Click here to go to IMDB now.

I know there are many more resources out there that I don't know about. If you know about any, we'd love to share them with everyone. Email me at storme@eleven72.com or leave a comment on the blog. What are your favorite movie illustrations? Where do you find them? What do you think? Let us know!