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More liked postsJoin us this Sunday for our next teaching series, Cross Stitching God. We will look at four common scripture references that are cross stitched or displayed in our homes that are often misquoted, misunderstood, misapplied, or used out of context, and reveal their true context and meaning.
God’s Global Heart Project Workflow
Back in March, I had the incredible opportunity to travel to Haiti with Rick Everswick and Matt Dean. Since I love to travel, I was beyond excited and I had the extra privilege of getting to capture the story of our partners down there. For those of you who are interested in the production workflow for some of our video work, here’s a short overview of how we captured and pieced together the story of Smith and Katia Bordenave.
We had a very limited amount of time to shoot (we were in the country for less than 24 hours!), so there was certainly a lot of pressure to make sure I got all the shots. I was the only one from the Creative Team down there, so I was solely responsible for capturing the story and any b-roll. The pressure was on!
Traveling abroad is always tricky when you are trying to capture video, so I had to pack light. Here’s a little bit of what I brought with me:
2 Canon 7D’s
Canon 70-200mm L Series
Canon 24-70mm L Series
Canon 50mm 1.4
ND Fader (8 stops)
Some cleaning accessories and other little things
Small HD DP6 monitor
2 Senheiser Lav Mics
2 Tripods (had to check these)
1 mono pod
2 rode video mics
Batteries, CF cards, SD cards
2 zoom H4n recorders (one for backup)
Headphones for monitoring audio
A couple of hard drives for backing up the footage
Macbook Pro
Everything (except for the tripods and mono pod) was packed into a LowePro Roller X200 bag and carried on the plane. This is a great bag for traveling! We had to check the tripods, since the TSA wouldn’t let us carry this big, heavy, metal “weapon” on a plane (who knows why?).
We had about an hour to shoot the interview, and then an hour after lunch to shoot b-roll at the orphanage. This definitely affected how I would edit, since I knew I wouldn’t have a ton of footage to use throughout the piece.
When I got back home, I started the post production process. Everything was done in Final Cut Pro X (which I love!). I brought all the footage in as the raw H.264 codec, and transcoded the media into ProRes 422. Since I shot two camera angles, I was able to sync everything up using the built-in multi-cam feature. It worked like a charm!
When you are editing a piece that is 15 minutes long, you have a lot of footage to work with. Then you throw in subtitles over the whole thing and it can get crazy. I sent Dan (our host in Haiti) the raw uncut footage so he could translate for us. After he sent us the translation, I built all the subtitles and lined them up where they belong (or close to it). One of the great features of FCP X is the use of compound clips. Once I’m done working with a section that has a bunch of clips, I can go from this…
to this…
This makes it much easier to work with, and then I can actually move entire sections of the story without losing all the subtitles that go with it. Brilliant.
After we got the story cut and made all our edits, it was time to add music and color the piece. We found some acoustic tracks that matched the vibe we were going for on Rdio, so that part was pretty easy. To color it, I used a plugin called “Finisher” from Crumple Pop. Now, there’s a key difference between color correction and color grading. At least to me there is. When I think of color correction, I’m not going for a look that is very stylized. Instead, I’m trying to make it look as natural as possible. This might mean bringing in some contrast and saturation, or adjusting the color temperature so it is properly white balanced. When I think of color grading, I’m looking for something stylized and not as natural looking.
For this piece, I didn’t want something super stylized, so I was really color correcting. Using Finisher is a quick, easy, and very efficient way to do color correcting. Everything we shoot is shot with a very flat picture profile. This allows us to capture as much detail in the shot, without losing highlights and shadows. Then, when we color, we can bring out that contrast. Here’s an example that shows the uncolored vs colored version.
Uncolored …
Colored…
So that’s the final step. After it’s colored, we export at full-quality to show on Sunday morning, and then export a web version as well.
I hope that helps to understand some of our workflow on the videos we create! Here’s the final piece if you missed the service viewing on Sunday: Skip to 16:45 to view just the piece we are discussing.
Cultivating Times of Worship
Have you ever had a Community Group meeting without Jesus? I know I’ve been guilty of it! It’s far too easy to focus on the preparation, the discussion, and completely leave Jesus out of our meetings. While Community Groups should bring us to the feet of Jesus, it’s easy to check off our group meeting tasks and never actually experience God in our midst.
It’s important to keep our focus on God—not just because that’s what we’re supposed to do, but because it’s the only way we’ll experience true community. When we as Community Group members worship together, we focus our attention first on Jesus and His divine character made manifest in the person of Jesus Christ. Everything else the group does stems from this place of Christ-centeredness.
This upward focus on Jesus also brings a sense of transparency to the group, because coming face-to-face with the holiness of Christ means we see ourselves as we truly are: broken, sinful, and in need of grace. This vulnerability is essential for building community. Our pretensions are stripped down and we come as we are—with our flaws, the messy week we’ve had, and the angry words we said to our spouses earlier that day. Sure, these evidences can be easily concealed from our group, but worship provides the space to open ourselves to God and to others.
In Acts 2:42, we read: “They devoted themselves … to the breaking of bread and prayer … they were praising God.” The early Christians worshiped in their homes, and the result was “everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the Apostles.” The bottom line is that God shows up when we make room for Him.
I encourage you, in whatever group setting, to take time to worship our Savior. You’ll experience Him in new ways!
A HOPE Market Story - Cottages for children in Haiti
North Metro Church, Hope you’re doing well! Just wanted to send you a brief update regarding the gift in the amount $4082.92 that you sent us in January from the HOPE Market. As you know, we earmarked that gift to help start the development of the land site we purchased last fall for transitional housing for our kids as they begin to age out of the orphanage. We’re now moving full-steam ahead on that project and although I know you visited the site while you were in Haiti last month I wanted to relay a few bits of info your way. The architectural firm in Omaha that is donating their services and developing the site plan and blue prints for the little cottages is well under way with their work, and a copy of one of the renditions for some of the cottages is below. Our Haitian contractors have nearly finished building the security wall and are continuing to rebuild what had been damaged in the earthquake.
Thank you again for the gift to help us launch this new segment of our ministry - you guys are such a blessing to us!
Dan
FMI Gift of God Orphanage - Haiti
Check out a North Metro Church original tune, Grateful. Hope you enjoy this little music video we shot.
