Take a look at what's inspiring us for the month of April!
This months friday freebie involves a hipster, rain, and an all around bad day. If you need some emotive slow motion broll for your next project then this post is for you.
Have you ever felt overdressed for a party or even perhaps a date? Or what about feeling underdressed for a job interview or meeting that you thought was going to be casual but was actually strictly business? The horror. Most of us have, and it can be a little awkward at times. Of course, you'll get through it, but you're still left feeling a little out of place. That same principle applies to typography. Understanding how to properly use typefaces can make the difference between your designs looking good and your designs looking great.
At Highlands, we believe giving service attendees a break from the traditional on-stage announcement of upcoming events is a welcome change to the Sunday routine! We have found that an upbeat and energetic announcement video will keep people engaged and from playing on their phones after praise and worship. Over the years we have found that there are a few key elements to making the most of an audience’s attention span through effective script writing and shooting
Sometimes the most complicated part about learning to edit video is knowing what settings to use while exporting. What codec should I use? What container? Bitrate? Frame rate? In this post, I'm going to cover how we export video to play in our church services on Sunday mornings.
Get some creative motivation for your week. Here is a curated list of some of the things we are most inspired by currently.
For this first freebie I thought we would give away something that will make animating text in AE a little quicker and easier. I've created three text presets that I use on a regular basis and masked them within some animated paths.
We are on the last leg of a crazy busy season here at highlands. We went from At The Movies, straight into Christmas services, 21 Days of Prayer, and Financial Freedom conference, then into two new series, the Dream Team party and then Ignite. We've got Catalyst and Easter coming up but we have a few weeks to catch our breath and collect our ideas before we crack down and start the grind again. While this season is busy we love it! We get to make some of our best content during these fast paced and high pressure times.
Sometimes after we’ve filmed a video we realize we’ve missed something or we need one more shot to really tell the story. And sometimes that’s after a huge shoot with lots of moving pieces and scheduling, like horses, armor and a crazy location. So you cant really just pack everything up and head back out to shoot. Sometimes you have to fake a shot and sometimes all you have to use is construction paper.
We got a facelift! Thanks to squarespace. But don't worry all of our old content is still available here!
This was an original post from a couple years ago. This is something we teach our Highlands College students still to this day. I decided to repost and add some more to it. Feel free to leave a comment and tell us some of your tips! If you don’t know, b-roll is video footage of something that is shown while the talent is speaking.
There are a couple of really key elements when it comes to editing video. One of those is feel. As a video editor, my job is to take whatever broll, interviews, pictures etc., and turn it into the best thing someone has ever seen ;) Ok... not really, but my job is to make the best product I can with what I have.
So you shot something awesome and dropped it in your timeline only to find out it is a tad bit shaky, ok maybe a lot bit shaky. Don't panic! We all do it from time to time and if you've got After Effects CC you're covered. In this post I'm going to quickly show you how to stabilize those shots that have a case of the shakes.
Interviewing people is an art form, and it's a continual learning process. Everyone is different, and when you interview one person, they may react to a set of questions differently than another person would. All this to say that the "rules of interviewing people" is a constantly changing list and i'm sure amendments could be added every time you interview someone new. That being said, here are a few rules that we follow that has helped us out throughout the process of capturing and telling someone's story.
As we've written about many times here, audio recording is just as important, if not MORE important than the video you're capturing for your productions. A bad sounding interview is very disconnecting to the viewer, while audio that's recorded well will make your video productions much more professional.
Some of our favorite video projects are the ones we get to create for our big events. Often we'll create a handful of videos that will play during each session of a conference. It can be a real challenge to continue to come up with fresh ideas for events that repeat each year -- so occasionally, we'll take the Hollywood approach and create the sequel!
Music is a critically important part in producing videos. It completely sets the tone and mood for the video. Music brings energy and makes you feel something. Sound must be taken seriously when being selected in videos.
Stuff looks awesome in slow motion right? Most people have seen shows like Time Warp that really slow things down, almost to a stop, that make something ordinary, look amazing! But did you know that many times, you are watching slow motion and you don't even know it?
There is a saying that goes something like this: “People are sheep.” In other words, people tend to go in the direction a good leader, or Shepherd, takes them and I think this same principle applies to coordinating talent for a video shoot. When each person on camera understands clearly what is expected of him or her and their time, then they are much more willing to agree to put themselves in what is, for many, an uncomfortable position: appearing on camera. Over the past few years I have picked up on a few tips that have worked for us. I hope these prove to be beneficial for your shoots as well!
For our most recent series opener, "Remind Me", we had the idea to film people in their everyday lives and have little spiritual reminders show up in their environment to remind them of a Biblical truth. To pull off this idea, we decided to use motion tracking to make it look like the reminders were really there with them. We put together a short tutorial that will give you an idea of how we created this series opener.
If there’s one thing I hate as a video editor, it’s having to edit videos with bad b-roll. If you don’t know, b-roll is video footage of something that is shown while the talent is speaking. For example, if your pastor is promoting small groups via video, it helps to have footage of some small group gatherings over him talking about it.