New Year, New Blog
We got a facelift! Thanks to squarespace. But don't worry all of our old content is still available here!
Read MoreShooting BRoll
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.
Read MoreWe Want to Hear From You!
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.
Read MoreFeel is Important
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.
Read MoreStabilizing Shaky Footage
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.
Read MoreConducting Testimony Interviews
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.
Read MoreQuick Tip: Digital Recorders
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.
Read MoreDon't be afraid of the sequel
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!
Read MoreRules of Storytelling.. from the best.
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.
Read MoreGreen Screen Basics
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.
Read MoreQuick Tip: Exporting Video
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.
Read MoreQuick Tip: Banner Design
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
Read More2 Camera Interview Setup
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.
Read MoreTraveling Light
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.
Read MoreHow to Coordinate Video Shoot Participants
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!
Read MoreVideo Tutorial: Motion Tracking
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.
Read MoreDon't Lose Sight of the Message
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".
Read MoreSound and Video
Sometime ago, I heard that Walt Disney had a revelation. The philosophy for their parks, rides, and video environments would be...
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