I’m way behind on posting projects I’ve been working on. One of the main reasons I set up this blog was to share video projects and some “how-to” info for students of my Leadership Institute workshops. So I’ve got three or four videos in the hopper that I’ll be blogging about in the days to come.
The video above was the promo video for our Lent series on the final words of Jesus, spoken from the cross. The sermons were also character studies, looking at the crucifixion through the eyes of those who were present at his death.
I’m grateful to the Kansas City area Catholic churches that allowed me in to film over a couple of days. It was the senior pastor’s idea to show a montage of crucifixes, supporting the idea of looking at the death of Christ from a number of different perspectives. I shot in a number of Protestant churches, too, just to see if those crosses would work in the mix, but ultimately we cut them out. The crucifixes just worked so much better.
The churches I went to were stunning. While filming, I also got some still shots at multiple exposures. Soon I’ll post some HDR shots of the interiors of the buildings, because some of the architecture was amazing. There’s great similarity and also great variety in seeing the various architectural expressions. (Actually, the image I used in my post on the Secular and the Sacred in Worship came from the back wall of one of these churches, one that had lots of Spanish flavor to its look.)
The camera I used in this was none other than the Canon Rebel. Amazing little camera. This is the T2i, which is now my go-to camera for lots of video shoots. The lens was the kit lens, 18mm-135mm. And I think I shot in auto exposure, too. Sometimes the camera cranked up the ISO to get proper exposure in dark sanctuaries. There’s a video plugin suite called Magic Bullet that has a denoiser plugin that works wonders, so the grainiest shot or two was run through that.
The Indie Slider Mini
The movement for this shot came from the Indie Slider Mini, a short little track that fits on a tripod. I’m using this gizmo a lot lately. The result is great, but getting those results can be frustrating, too. More expensive sliders are more stable and yield better results. This one can get a little wobbly, and I often do multiple passes before getting a shot that I like.
The music is from shockwave-sound.com. It’s not our usual stock music provider, but they have a great selection of cinematic / bombastic music, and it only costs about $30 to download the full version. They provide “watermarked” versions of their music to temporarily put in a video to test it out, and then you purchase and download the full version. The music from the 24 Hours that Changed the World promo came from there, too. Since this sermon series was really the third part in a trilogy (the third being The Final Week), we wanted a somewhat similar feel to each of the promos.