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 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.