June 29, 2008

This one went down very well. I got a lot of people together for this that would normally not really be together, so that created an interesting dynamic.
Lots of clever moments in this, and I particularly enjoy Steve's meanness, and June's cruel laugh.
Ben did a great job with the title screens for this too. Actually, he filmed some of this, giving me a much greater directorial role, which I really enjoyed.

June 22, 2008

We wanted a news format that we could re-visit when we wanted to. As usual, because Ben Jackson and myself are the brains behind the announcements, we ended up with a BBC feel to it. I really enjoyed making this one, and I think it came off really well.
I think my favourite bit is where I claim to be John Tanyan. Classic.

I learned a lot with this one - I used a lot of different transitions and visual effects. I think at one point I had 10 video channels running. It took forever to render, but I think it was worth it. We'll re-visit this format at some point, I'm sure.

June 15, 2008

I wanted to make the most of the fact that Jon Puddle was back in town, so I came up with a plot that would involve the whole IT team. I like the storyline, and particularly the impression given that Jon has come simply to sort out Jon Long's problem with his Mac. I had a great sequence with Pudd getting out of bed, and then a map with dots showing his progress across the Atlantic in the style of Indiana Jones, but the video was too long, and that scene ended up getting cut.

The video also features a guest appearance from Ken Lyons. Ken used to work in IT at TACF a long time ago, and was back in town at the same time. I decided to just put him in there, and see who noticed. A nice addition, I think.

After some problems with lighting in previous weeks, mainly at the TACF Airport campus, I decided to brighten this video post filming, but it didn't really work. I haven't used that function in Final Cut since.

June 8, 2008

Kevin Alfred was leaving the TACF offices in favour of education, so I wanted to get him in the announcements. We also had the Trumpet Call conference at TACF that week, so there was a series of tents set up in the parking lot for an installation. It all fit together to make this video.

Kevin really got into this, and went home to pick up those clothes, all of which were already in his wardrobe. This is the first time that people seemed to notice how contrived my efforts were becoming in getting the announcements to fit my plot.

The 'lullaby' at the end of this video is The Sprout and the Bean by Joanna Newsom.

June 1, 2008

I think I ended up getting in a little over my head with this one. I wanted to make a mock movie trailer for the sci-fi genre, and I allowed Ben to persuade me to rip-off the Matrix trailer. I took some scenes from the movie, and some sequences from the trailer itself. I even used the Crystal Method track that the trailer used. Most of the time it all works quite well, but in places I sacrificed my style for making it more like the original, and I rather wish that I hadn't done that.

I used green screen again for the scene where B.K jumps the buildings, but this time I filmed him running on the screen, and I was in a crane shooting down on him. Shame I didn't light the screen properly again...

Some of the dialogue in this is quite clever, but lost in the sense of the thing. Didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped, but it was rather ambitious to try to copy a movie with ground breaking special effects.

May 25, 2008

Another insight into 'office life'.
I appear in this one. I rather like that. I think I got Sam to film my scene. I also like the fact that this introduces the North York team to the other congregations - one of the original ideas of the video announcements was to help make us a closer knit community by introducing people to different campuses. This is sometimes quite difficult to do, because not everyone is around at the office when I'm filming.

My wife and daughter are in this one too. I think the moment when Adelaide smiles at Linda got the biggest laugh in this one.
I love working with Linda, because she is so good at ad-libbing. Her excuses for lateness in this video are superb and all off-the-cuff.

May 18, 2008

This one went down very well indeed.
I did quite a bit of research before I made this, trying to get the feel of the thing just right. My final port of call for this was to contact my good friend James, who is an expert in film, cinematography, and particularly early film. I was very pleased to read his response to my question of conventions for silent film, because I had fulfilled all but one of them.

The music plays a big part here. It's amazing how much atmosphere it adds. When we showed this at the North York congregation, the sound didn't work, and I found it rather dull.

Yawan really got into this one, and I think that all three main characters will reprise their roles at some point in the near future; I don't know how I'll top the pie in the face at the end though...

May 11, 2008

Simple idea here - the announcements are all given by mothers at TACF in honour of Mothers' Day.
See if you can spot the continuity error in Vero's announcement.

Note: the song at the start of the video is performed by a comic duo that I found online. The song gets very silly after the cut I performed on here...

May 4, 2008

When I was thinking about the video for Sunday, May 4, I wanted to do a Star Wars themed video (May the Fourth be with you...) However, an opportunity presented itself that was far too good to miss. The School of Ministry was having a Superhero evening, and all the students would be dressed up.

I wanted to give the feel of a BBC documentary with this, and worked quite closely with Ben Jackson again to come up with a name and graphics to pull this off. Once again, Ben's work totally transformed these announcements. We're aiming to make this into a series, re-visiting the idea of Leadership in Action at least once every School of Ministry semester.

This is one of my favourites. Great dialogue, fantastic graphics, silly costumes...
This is also the first time that I used a green screen to create special effects. I'd used the technique before with Paul McDonald in the Pray Hard episode, but didn't have a green screen, so just filmed him against a white wall and removed that, with very mixed results. This was better, but I still had lots to learn about lighting the screen.
The voiceover that you hear is none other than Ben Jackson.

April 27, 2008

After I made the Pray Hard video, I realised that if I wasn't careful, I'd end up constantly having to make more and more complicated videos to better myself. I made the decision to intersperse very ambitious concepts with more simple ones, like this.
I took my inspiration from the constant stream of people holding meetings with Lillian, but obviously exaggerated it a little. I wanted to give people a little glimpse of 'office life'.

This is, I think, the last time that I put another video into the announcements. From time to time we get sent videos from people promoting their events in the city. After this one, I made the decision not to do it any more, for a couple of reasons: firstly, the announcements should be TACF specific, and most of these videos don't fit into that catagory, and secondly, it's a very time consuming process. I would have to rip the dvd to my computer, and then import that clip into Final Cut, finally editing it, and then placing it into the announcements timeline. I think that it took me about 3 hours to get that 1 minute Global Day of Prayer video into these announcements.

April 20, 2008

Ha ha ha ha... Classic. Paul McDonald makes the perfect hero for this movie. I think my favourite bits are Jack getting shot on the roof (and then re-appearing in a later shot), Junior and the School of Champions manuals, and the silly joke with Ben on the phone to Paul "Nooooooooo! It's April 30 to May 3rd!"

This is what I really wanted for this video - not a direct rip-off of Die Hard's trailer (like I later did with the Matrix), but just something that would give the feel of an action movie. I'm still very pleased with it.

This is the first video that Ben Jackson made graphics for. After this, I think I've had him make me a little something pretty much every week. He is rather good at it...
This video is soundtracked with a track by the Crystal Method. The vocal sample on the track is Billy Graham, of all people.
The voiceover for the trailer is provided here by Fred Wright.

Interestingly, this video was not shown at TACF Airport. It was decided that the scenes showing guns were not going to go down particularly well with some parents of younger children, so it didn't air. Apparently it was very well received elsewhere.

April 13, 2008

When I decided to do a commercial themed video, I did a bit of research. I found some amazing commercials, most of which I didn't use as inspiration. It's interesting for me to look at commercials that are considered to be classics over here in North America that I've never seen.

I went with a combination of new commercials, some of which I was familiar with, and some old ones that only North American people would recognise.
This was the second time that I'd used an introduction to the announcements that didn't end up being the main focus for the video - the first was with Steve and Sandra Long in Israel on the March 23 announcements.

April 6, 2008

I rather like this one. I think it's a little more subtle than some of the others, and I'm sure that only Vero, Amanda and myself get some of the jokes. I especially like the scene in the baptistry.

I was thinking more about the music that I was using for the announcements by this point, and chose my favourite track from Jon Patell's debut album http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif. The track is called The Sea.

I cut a shot from the end of this video. Originally, when Amanda prays for Vero, Vero starts manifesting, and falls over, but I took it out in favour of their excitement at Vero getting the interpretation for the tongues.

March 30, 2008

The idea for this video came from the fact that Bethel church in Redding, CA are known for fantastic video announcements. The guy that does their announcements was here at TACF for the Freshwind Youth Conference, so we got him on board to help us out. Check out Bethel's announcements here.

An interesting fact about this video: at 0:42 on the video, you can hear Mel Jefferey say "That's a good idea". Mel didn't know that we were filming the announcements, and apparently genuinely believed that we were going to kidnap Banning. Brilliant.

March 23, 2008

I think this is the first video that I uploaded onto Youtube. It's also the first one that I edited with Final Cut, so I'm just learning here.

Welcome!

Welcome to the TACF Video Announcements blog.
Here, you'll find all the video announcements, posted the week that they were shown.
There'll also be information on how we filmed things, what's coming up, and how you can get involved, amongst other things.
Keep checking the page for new videos, and don't forget to subscribe to our channel at youtube.com