As we were searching for inspiration for how to promote our Easter services via social media, I came across Saddleback's 2014 Easter package. Learn how we used our own shareable images to let our followers promote Easter across social media.
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.
The Creative Team at Highlands is in search of a video producer! This position is for the person who loves video.
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.
GROW is a resource partnership, training process and support system with Church of the Highlands. We hold an intensive each year where we invite churches to come and learn principles that have helped us reach people.
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!
Storytelling is the heart of what we do on the video team. Storytelling is used in testimonies, highlight videos and creative promos. Here are a few tips on storytelling from Pixar's own, Emma Coats.
Every once in a while, we get to pull out the green screen and put it to use. It's an effective way to put your talent in a place you don't have access to, or to give you a generic look for a church news shoot.
There are a few things that you can do to ensure that what you've been editing plays back looking great in a manageable file size for your playback computer. We're going to show you how we do it in Final Cut Pro, but the settings and principals should be similar in most editing programs.
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.
Highlands uses banners for event and program promotion. Designing for banners take a slightly different approach due to their size. Here are a couple of parameters that you will want to use when designing banners
For interview and testimony videos, we like to use a two camera setup with a traditional 3-point lighting rig. In this post I will go over how and where we place our cameras, lights and microphone. Wherever we shoot, we use this system, and it works for just about every condition.
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?
At Highlands, we try to have at least two to three people, if not more, on a shoot. We've learned that more eyes and ears you have on set the less likely you are to make a mistake, however there are still situations that arise when everyone on the team finds themselves shooting solo.
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.
Something that we are very careful about here is making sure that we don't put the "creative" that's in us as a team over the message of the content we're delivering. It's easy to forget about the end goal of what you're producing when your primary focus is on making something "cool".
Sometime ago, I heard that Walt Disney had a revelation. The philosophy for their parks, rides, and video environments would be...
If you are using Illustrator or Photoshop to lay out text intensive print pieces then this is for you
No matter what your priorities for lighting your stage, you should always make sure that you are doing a few key things.
Disney's Animation Department developed certain principles that they would incorporate to make their characters look not only natural, but larger-than-life. Today these principles are not only the foundation of Disney and Pixar's films, but of motion graphics as well.
The most common way to get your designs on t-shirts is through the process of screen printing. Knowledge of the fundamentals of screen printing is helpful when designing for them. There are several areas to consider that will affect your design and cost.
One of the things I first noticed when joining the team at Highlands was the constant desire to get better. It’s almost incessant. Every person, in every department, constantly looks for ways to get better, and takes action to improve. The creative department is no exception...
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.