Monday Morning Motivation

Or "MMM" for short, is going to be a regular series where we show you a few of the videos/mographs/art that is currently inspiring us or that we are creatively pulling from. Basically just selected videos to fuel your audiovisual diet and push you to make better work in whatever your area may be. Also if you find something you love and you think should fit here, tweet us @CothCreative.  Hopefully these pieces will make you say "mmm" just like they do for us. 

Video:

Motion Graphics:

Art:

Joe Cavazos - Advent iiii - Dribbble

Linn Fritz - Workspace - Dribbble

Joe Cavazos - Heaven & Nature Sings - Dribbble

"mmm, that's nice."

Friday Freebie - 3 Text Presets for After Effects

Here at Highlands Creative we want to start giving away some of the things we use and create to better help you! This is the first in hopefully many more posts where we give you all something you can use. 

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. 

These are pretty smooth and have a lot of uses from your announcement slides to Lower Thirds. In the download you'll find an AE project with all of the files within them as well as a folder containing the presets to drop in your AE presets folder. If you don't know how to install presets, then follow this link. Once you've got them installed you can open up AE and drop them on any text file and you should see the smooth text animation you see above. It is super easy and even the most beginner of AE users can do this. Also another preset is in there, a trim paths preset. You see it used above to animate the lines drawing in and out. I use this all the time for all sorts of stuff. It starts in the middle and animates out to the edge of the path. Again, something that will hopefully speed you up and make AE easier for you. 

Video Recap - Dream Team Party // Ignite

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.

Here is a recap of our last month or so of work:

IGNITE 

Marriage Mayhem iPhone

Marriage Mayhem Dirty Dishes

Ignite Story - Hill

Ignite Story - Adams

Ignite Story - Baulch

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Dream Team Party

Dream Team: We ♥ U!

The At The Movies Department

Messing With Dream Teamers

Why I Serve

2015 Dream Team Songs

We Are Hiring a Video Producer

The Creative Team at Highlands is in search of a video producer! This position is for the person who loves video. Not sure if this is you? Well . . . you know you love video when:

• You see a blue sky free of clouds and think, "Yeah, I could key that out . . . "
• It bothers you when florescent light bulbs have a different white balance
• Or when florescent lights bug you altogether ...
• When you set creative cow as your homepage, but question why their website looks like it's from the nineties
• You watch TV and say, "hmmm, I like that lower third"

If this list describes you, and you would love to work with other passionate creatives to create video in a ministry environment, then this position could be right for you. In this role you will be helping to tell documentary-style stories about what God is doing in people's lives. You will be doing something you love and helping to share the gospel at the same time.

Requirements for this position:

• Must be proficient with Apple Computers, Final Cut Pro and/or Adobe Creative Cloud video production software.
• Self-motivated and energized about the entire process of visual storytelling from concept to export of final versions.
• Strong technical understanding of studio lighting and sound setup.
• Familiarity with special effects, compositing, and color correction.
• Must be a team player, enjoy a collaborative team environment and take creative direction.
• DSLR Camera experience is preferred.
• Design and Mograph work a plus.

To apply for this position send a resume, along with an online link of your most current work to hr@churchofthehighlands.com. No DVD reels will be accepted, but VHS and HI-8 are ok. 

At The Movies - Special Effects with Construction Paper

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.

I’ve always heard the phrase “fake it till you make it”. While that doesn’t hold true in many situations in life it does hold true in this one. We had just finished a huge day long shoot for At The Movies, that included horses, knights, driving off-road down what seemed to be a mountain, lots of moving shots, epic phrases and one 4-wheel drive getting broken. It was a crazy day to say the least. Well when we got back to the office and sat down to edit we realized we were missing a shot that we needed. If you haven’t seen the video then you should know that it is about a robin hood like character (Darian/Red Fox) who is stopping a couple of knights in the forest and demanding money. The video starts with Darian scouting the knights from a distance, but you wouldn’t know he was actually looking at the knights until you see this one shot where they are both in frame. Well…we forgot to get that shot during our daylong shoot. So without it, the video looks like a man walking around in the woods and some knights riding in the woods and then boom they’re together. We didn’t like that and we knew we needed one more shot. So we looked at our footage and planned out a shot we could composite together. Luckily, our Creative Director had captured this shot of the day:

So we used this as the background. Then we found a shot of the knights walking, luckily this shot was locked down on a tripod. Then we masked them out and scaled them down like this:

We overlaid the knights on the picture, added some grain and matched the colors and got this:

Then we needed the red fox. Well, we have the red fox outfit and we have trees so we knew we could shoot something that would fit. So we went down to our Highlands Kids area and found a huge piece of blue construction paper. Yes, like the kind you used to make snowflakes out of in 1st grade. Then we went out back and found a nice tree and then set up this shot:

Normally you would use a green screen for this but look at all that green, I don’t want to have to try to get rid of green in a scene full of green. So that’s why we used the blue construction paper. Another very important step of this is that this shot was locked down on a tripod, just like the shot we are putting this shot into. Also, this isn't even the same guy it's actually Matt Minor, the knight on the right in the video. So in the final version Matt is actually in the frame twice. Anyway, after we grabbed our shot we headed back to the office and with the help of Andrew Kramer’s trusty tutorial removed the blue and placed Darian, er Red Fox, into the scene. Then we added some extra leaves and animated them a little. We got the leaves here. This was our end result:

Also we used that same piece of construction paper to replace a scene from last years Pirate Promo. Here is the original from 2013:

And here is what we replaced it with by using the paper instead of going back to the beach or buying more sand:

Hopefully you can see how easy it is to fake a shot, especially a quick one, that will add a lot to the end project. All you need is a camera and some construction paper. Watch the final result below and stay tuned on the blog and soon I will show you how to make that fake arrow shot!  

New Year, New Blog

We got a facelift! Thanks to squarespace. But don't worry all of our old content is still available here! 

With this new look, we have some new and updated features. Make sure to check out our updated "Gear" page which you can find via the Navigation bar or within our FAQ's. Another update is to our "Who We Learn From" page, where you can find all of the people and sites we look to for education in the creative world. This is a great resource for beginners as well as seasoned veterans. You can find this in our FAQ's as well! Something we've added is out "Photos" page. This is a constantly updating page full of behind the scenes photos on sets and in the office. Lastly, we are adding a "Resource" section to give out some of our project files and footage for you all to have and play around with. This will be coming in the future so make sure to check back often to see what we've added.

Now, I'll admit, we haven't been as active on here as we should be or as much as we promised we would be to those who came to GROW last year. So this is the first step for us to become better bloggers. Now, we aren't professional bloggers by any means and we still have a lot to learn. So, don't be surprised be spelling and grammatical errors or too much sarcasm or run on sentences. Those things don't matter, what matters is us helping you succeed in your creative process while advancing the gospel and growing the Kingdom.

So, if you have a question about anything we do, or want to see a post about anything we do, then please comment on this blog to let us know! And I mean anything. Anything from how we shoot a story to how we get our haircut to what blending modes we used on a layer in Photoshop to what our favorite recipes are. Please let us know anything you want to know, see or have explained!

We are going to attempt to get better info to you and more of it. We have learned a lot in 2014 and can't wait to share it with all of you in the months to come!