Punctuation series promo

So, how do you make something like this? With a stack of paper like this.

Practical Atheist series open

A special thanks to Chris Isham and Will Rodes for lending their photography skills.

Unleash 2010 opener

Here’s the opener for Unleash 2010.

Trying something a little different, a lot fun.

Coeur De Pirate – concert visuals

What a beautiful and well visualized piece. This is used for a concert visual, I presume some sort of backdrop, to compliment the song. As a piece it doesn’t really go anywhere, but it has a great art style and is a lot of fun.

10th Anniversary Event Opener

This piece ran after the counter and was used as a setup for the first song, Solution.

* This piece is free and clear to download. Do enjoy!

** Special thanks to Austin Booth who composed the original score.

Fix You

This is the video compliment to the band’s performance of the track “Fix You” by Coldplay. Over the past 2-3 weeks we have had boards set up at all of our locations where people could sign them if they were saved or baptized at NewSpring.

From there we photographed the boards (along with some of the people) and mixed these images together. This is the result.

Example of the piece in play


Example of one of the boards (this one from Florence)

Technical brief
Boards shot with anything from higher end Canon 5D’s down to standard issue point and shoot cameras. In After Effects, I manually masked out each exterior framing, applied a handful of Levels/Curves treatements to isolation the signatures, then utilized the Multiply blend mode (primarily) to lay on the blacks. The blood elements are from a stock collection of ink drops.

** As special thanks to Barron Cooley and the other slew of volunteers who did all of the photography.

*** The audio track is from the band’s performance recording, which I then used to gauge timing and pace of the song. It was executed as a soft roll video, one where we did not send a complimentary click.

The Best is Yet to Come

Here’s just a little graphical telling of the NewSpring story, set to music and toned in green.

Technical details on this one; as is typical with my pieces as of late I composed this one with a script on the white board first. I’ve that to be the most effective way to lay out a piece, figure out if the storyboard makes sense, and compose the narrative. You’ll see a few elements on there that didn’t make it into the final piece (the time line elements, for instance). Remember the script can be fluid.

Christmas media

Here are a few things the team assembled for the Christmas Eve services. Adam (and crew, be sure to check out the liner notes on our Vimeo page) made this delightful opener in conjunction with Jesse Fisher of Kadence.tv.

And I put together this little promo for our upcoming 10th anniversary services.

noise.

This past Sunday Perry had a point he wanted to make concerning the noise we have in our life. Sometimes you can’t hear God for all of the noise. So he had us compose this little piece. The way it worked: when Perry began his point we fired the video. We keyed out the green, so where you see the green you saw live video. As the piece builds we pull down his volume.

Point made. I thought it was pretty effective.

Home for Christmas (series video elements)

It’s the holiday season, and that means a new freshly minted Christmas series for us at NewSpring. After several brainstorms with many heads coming together we collectively landed on the idea of a shot piece for the series packaging.

The aim was for a series that was a little warmer and human, something that really touched on the concept of the invitation. Home is warm, home is inviting, you can always go home. And then to carry the story a little further we opted to build first half of the story into the 5:00 counter that begins the services. (so hey, if you missed it this week get there early next Sunday to watch the entire piece).

This is a first for us, composing a shot story into the series open, then extending the story earlier into the service. My favorite part of the process was watching every person on the production team contribute a hand. That may be one of my greatest joys of the holiday season, media-wise.

SERIES COUNTER

SERIES OPEN

NewSpring Ghost sighting

No doubt you’ve probably all seen or heard about our recent ghost sighting, but in case you missed it:

For the fun technical debrief. The footage is really from our security cameras. The export feature doesn’t play well with Macs so we ended up literally shooting the computer monitor with a camera (thanks to Will and Justin for running the footage down). This process also added some of the hazy brownish glare.

I added in the crosshairs, REC button, and timecode directly in After Effect. None of those are in the original footage. Why did I include the timecode? It’s there so when I sat in the service I would know when he jumped out (it’s 38:22 in case you wondered).

For the “ghoul,” I started with still image. After some Photoshop extraction and a bit of color grading to get him to fit into the scene it hit me… if he’s jumping in front of the camera he should be blurry. So add in a bit of Gaussian Blur.

My favorite part. I used the mesh warp tool to distort his mouth just a bit, to make him react to the scream.

For audio there’s a slight room noise I pulled from a stock collection just to make you think you hear something.

In the end I think it was pretty effective and got the proper reaction. What did you think? Did you jump.

Don’t Get Married Until…

This weekend marked the beginning of a new series, Don’t Get Married Until… For the visual package and opener Perry’s sole request was that it should an element of hip-hop. Listening to the 90s station the other day I heard some Heavy D and I instantly knew it was the right choice. The goal in this piece is to set up the series with “if you’re ______, then you’re not ready to get married.” Here’s the resulting opener.

Tomorrow I’ll post of the preproduction details (and a special preliminary video), sketches, and talk a little about the process.

Don’t Get Married Until… promo

Here’s an little promo I built that ran last weekend in our NeedToKnow announcements for the upcoming series “Don’t Get Married Until.”

FUSION 09 intro – PC3 (Wilmington, NC)

I’m really digging the motion tracking and rotoscope work from the FUSION 09 intro created by PC3. Watch the digger’s arm rotoscope at the 1:10 mark, very clean. Nice work guy.

FUSION 09 Intro from PC3 on Vimeo.

Nice… and creepy

Loving the use of Twitch (I assume) in this piece and if it weren’t so creepy I know G would be digging the use of gears
moogaloop.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object)

Apocalypse Please visuals

A different perspective, these are the visuals I built for the NewSpring band’s cover of Muse’s Apocalypse Please. Captured on the iPhone this is about as raw as it comes. See some screen grabs below for the glitch in all its detail. We were going for “digital dirt.”

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Dirt Conference

In November Joshua and I will be trekking to Little Rock to be a part of Dirt Conference. It really dig the vibe of what they’re trying to do; empowering churches and artists to use the gifts they have and not complain about their limitations.

I’ll be a part of 4 labs covering team chemistry, motion graphics, how to communicate with your senior pastor (disclosure: I’m spoiled by my senior pastor, Perry. Evidence here), and team organization (count how many times I say “whiteboard” and “Evernote“).

Title sequece

Ben shared this with me the other day and all I can say is “more of that, please.” Very nice.

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End Times Promo

I should also direct you to Adam’s post, etc. He did a beautiful job on this piece.

small mograph

Not every motion graphic piece we do is a large scale, massive piece. Sometimes they’re small. A little tag here, a small photography composition there. A little color grading, a little clean up work, building a quick motion loop element. I enjoy these “small mograph” pieces. They break the flow, allow for you to start and complete the project within an hour or two, and add a little functional gloss to part of the service.

Here is an example of such a piece. We welcomed Todd Fields to lead worship this weekend at NewSpring’s Anderson campus. Just so people knew who he was and to not take away from the energy that begins the service I built this little 10 sec tag that ran directly after the service counter during the intro of the first song. Simple, effective.

Todd Fields open from Ken Wilson on Vimeo.

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