This is how we do it.

Annual reports at a church are usually presented before an evening service or for 15 min during a service. The report is primarily centered around a Powerpoint presentation with graphs and lots of numbers. It is often presented by the administrative pastor who has very little, if any stage presence.

We wanted to take a different approach to educating our people on the financials of the church. Our goal was to provide a high level overview with enough numbers to satisfy those who want to know but with enough energy to still keep the rest of us engaged.

Trying something a little different

So, every church I have ever work for always struggles with announcements. How many to have each week, live or video, do you let people walk up right before service and add announcements? These are just a few of the issues I have seen over the years.

We try to consistently try to do Video announcements because of the control of the messaging and time. Since I have been at Park we have been through several versions of announcements. The first format was to have the staff that was over the events to do them... that did not work. We have many events that are volunteer driven so scheduling became a nightmare to deal with.

We have done Graphical driven video announcements. And have tried a couple of times with a "host" type delivery video. Continuing to be frustrated with the process I decided to contact a local actress that attends our church to play the role of host for the video, she will do them every week. Here is our first one, I am excited to see how this evolves for us.

Editing

We shot a promo for program called Alpha the other day.
The actress, Kirby O'Connell, that came in to do the promo was fighting a cold at the time. After we shot the footage we noticed there was a "glisten" in her right nostril in some of the shots. It was very noticeable in three of the shots. we were short on time to get it turned around for the weekend. I spent a couple of hours Saturday tracking the "glisten" and applying a circle blur to remove it.

This is the unedited promo

This is the motion tracking for the circle blur

This is the final edit of the promo.

Maps

Our lead pastor, Jackson Crum, uses a lot of historical references during his teaching. He often shows you temples, ruins, statues, and maps. As you can imagine the quality of most biblical maps leaves a lot to be desired.

I was watching CNN one day and saw them use Google maps. I was hooked, what a relevant way to show people what happened. The first map that I did I was amazed at the terrain. When I imagine Paul on his journeys I did not thinks about how rough the terrain was that he had to overcome. It brought it home to me in a whole new way. This file is Paul's 4th Journey. 

I purchased the Google Earth application so that it gives me the ability to export to what ever codec that I need. I export to HD720 and it plays flawlessly. The program is somewhat challenging because it really is not a "production" type of package so you have limited control over time and speed. I will often bring the file into Final Cut Pro and speed it up, or pause it at a location for an extended amount of time.

The reaction from our people has been overwhelming they really love it. During our Three Screen setup I created one that spanned the screens, you almost needed Dramamine because of the motion sickness effect it had. For that one I exported the clip at 1080p so I had the most pixels to work with.

Relationship Status

So we are going through 1st Corinthians. We are hitting the relationship part in February. We have branded this section Relationship Status, This is a preview for the series. Week one is dealing with sexual immorality, week two is Singles, week three is marriage, and week 4 is divorce.  The last couple of series have had complicated art so we decided to make this one really simple to keep things mixed up. This is a very different look for us so it will be fun to hear people's response. 

We Shall Overcome

This was another element in our Martin Luther King Jr service. This is a live recording of Michelle singing. This was not a planned element it was a spontaneous creative moment during rehearsal Sunday morning, I went to my office and put the footage together. It truly was a special moment Michelle stood center stage backlit only, it was powerful.

Unhindered Shoot photos

I snapped these picture of the Ink shoot for our Unhindered series.

3 Screen Setup

For the Winter set we decided to to a three screen set up as the center piece of our stage. We run ProPresenter software as our lyrics and video play back solution so all we had to add was the module package and the Matrox TripleHead2Go box. We already had the projectors and screens and each projector had a individual cable runs.

I set up my sequence in Final Cut Pro to 2400 X 600 and Shot all the footage in HDV720p. It is a challenge to think about editing this way when you are shooting I put some guide lines on my LCD viewfinder to help out.