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.