Church marketing video - suggestions needed

[Dave McElderry]

Our chuch has decided that it wants to produce a marketing video. The final product will be about 15 minutes in length, produced from beginning to end by church members/volunteers. There is no money to pay a professional. We are relatively small and, to be honest, struggling. I know this has been done many times before, with productions at every level of quality .

I've created quite a few short presentations for Sunday morning services, basically glamourized slideshows. Several years ago, however, I was involved in making a DVD for a building project fund-raising campaign, so I'm not totally green at the idea. However, that project was thrown together hurriedly, and not very well thought out. It was about six weeks from start to finish. Considering the time restraints I was fairly pleased with how it turned out.

This time we anticipate perhaps about 9 months or more, finishing up next spring. Pre-production, storyboarding, scripting, gathering of the raw video and stills, etc., will last through this Christmas. Then the final editing will take place. My part in this will be to provide one of the camcorders (Panasonic PV-GS400 MiniDV) and aid in taking video. I may also provide the equipment for recording the narration. I will then edit the raw footage, stills, and soundtrack into the final product with PrEl 7 (or maybe PrEl 8 by then). The editing part bothers me the least. It's getting quality raw materials for the editing that I'm most concerned about.

I have in my possession a copy of a marketing DVD that was produced by another same-denomination church in our city - a church with similar resources to the best of my knowledge. I sincerely doubt that there was professional production involved. However, I'm blown away by the quality of the video that they were able to get. The lighting and just overall quality is in many ways close to professional. Of course it's possible that there is someone in their church who was able to provide superior prosumer equipment and a goodly amount of expertise. I'm going to do some digging to see what I can find out. The editing was also very good, although given the time i believe I can do as well.

I need help in getting off on the right foot. Although our team will consist of talented people who will contribute in a wide variety of important ways, it looks like I'm likely to be the most technically inclined member. At best I'm no more than an amateur hobbyist. I know my limitations. I would appreciate any and all suggestions that the good folks here can provide, including pointing me to any good reference materials that might be of value. Feel free to post here or contact me by private e-mail.

Many thanks in advance.

[Chuck Engels]

Hi Dave,
Sounds like a great project to be a part of, should be very exciting.

Do the cameras you will be using have manual White Balance?
That is probably one of the most important things next to the lighting itself.
Proper white balance can make or break the quality of the video and auto white balance does not always give you the best.

If it would be possible to use all the same camcorders that would help a lot as well, HV20's or HV30's would be a real plus.

[Dave McElderry]

My Panasonic does have manual white balance, but honestly I've never used it. It takes awesome video in good lighting, but like most consumer camcorders the quality suffers significantly as the available light diminishes. I don't have any special lights, so not sure what to do there. I'll take a look at the manual regarding manual white balance. It's an excellent point.

I'm not sure what other camcorders will be used, but it's highly doubtful that we'll have the luxury of using the same models. I do understand where you're coming from. I told the marketing committee yesterday that we needed to stick to MiniDV if at all possible. I know of another church member who has a Canon MiniDV and he helped with the building fund project. They're going to put out a call for anyone who has MiniDV camcorders to consider helping out the project. I'll know more about our camcorder resources in a few weeks.

That does bring up another point though Chuck. My Panasonic can do widescreen, and that's what I normally shoot in. IF by chance we should end up having other widescreen capable camcorders at our disposal, what's your opinion about making the project in widescreen vs standard 4:3?

[Chuck Engels]

I only shoot widescreen these days Dave. I don't have a widescreen projector or TV, but you get so much more video that way. I like the larger view a whole lot more and I think that most people are used to seeing widescreen these days. Even though it shows letterboxed on my TV I like it more than 4:3, but not everyone agrees with that.

I'm sure there will be a web version, widescreen will be great for that. What is the primary format and delivery method going to be?

[Dave McElderry]

Chuck, the primary delivery method will be DVD, but they're planning to also make it available on the church website. When we did the building fund vid 4 years ago we also made some copies to VHS for those who didn't have DVD players yet. I don't know for sure, but I doubt that will happen this time.

I tend strongly toward your philosophy, although you did surprise me a little that you feel that way, since you don't have a widescreen TV. One of these days you will have, and all of that video will be ready to go. Smart guy. It will be interesting to see how the committee feels about this, but I personally will probably try to sway them towards widescreen.

As an aside, we have a widescreen TV in our living room, but upstairs in the bedroom we have an old (mechanical tuner) CRT TV. Our local NBC station went entirely to widescreen the other day when the digital transition took place. So when they show a standard 4:3 picture it's inside a letterboxed widescreen format. That means that this little TV just became a bunch smaller. My wife wasn't real happy.

[Dave McElderry]

An update to this topic. I did some of the first video work last evening. I did try the manual white balance. Everything was inside, and I was in 3 separate areas of the church. One area had a mix of natural light through light colored stained glass, high incandescents, fluorescents, and spotlights. The second was sodium vapor, and the third was strictly fluorescents. What a nightmare. In each area I just tried doing a manual white balance using a piece of typewriter paper. A couple of times I forgot to white balance but remembered after a short time, so I got some "before and after" samples unintentionally. The results were impressive. This is definitely worth doing. Thanks for this tip Chuck! Any other suggestions from anyone are appreciated. This is a long and ongoing project.

[Chuck Engels]

Glad to hear you had positive results from the white balancing Dave. With that many different types of light it is an extremely important step.

Here is our current promotional video
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FkUwOuMMSM[/youtube]

Have you seen any of the contemporary video these days? It is all overly obvious hand held shots with fast movement and rapid cuts. Kind of looks strange to me but it is after all an art form You can see this to some degree in some of the new TV shows like 'Friday Night Lights'.

Here is a good example
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ab9uvJIjS8E[/youtube]

[Dave McElderry]

Chuck, I've seen the type of video you're talking about. Some is okay, but sometimes it leaves me cold (and half seasick). It don't think it would go over with much of our congregation. The DVD team is working on exactly what "feel" of final product we want, and it's tough to appeal to everyone. The young people are going to be the future of our church if it is to survive, and we need something that will hold their attention. At the moment it looks like we're shooting for about a 15 minute production. One guy suggested 25 minutes but pretty well got shot down. Nobody would watch it all the way through, and honestly I can't imagine much content that we could produce that we could stretch that long. I'm not even sure about 15 minutes, but we've got to start somewhere. That may change before we're finished.

I forgot to tell you...
I finally talked yesterday with the church whose video we had been watching. It turns out that they did have it done professionally, by some outfit out of Texas. They came in on a weekend and shot it all. No wonder I was impressed with the quality of the video. They were probably using $25,000 camcorders, and obviously not only had the proper lighting and audio equipment but had a professional team to do it. Cost? $6,500. For us that might as well have been a million dollars. We can't afford to have this done professionally. It looks like I'm all they've got. However, I do have people who are going to be writing script and we'll have an artistic director who can guide me in editing to a desired final product. The funny part about the professional video production is that there was absolutely nothing in the editing that couldn't be done with Premiere Elements, and nothing that was beyond my capabilities. If I could get as good of quality of raw footage, I could put together as good or better a product.

[Chuck Engels]

Did you have a chance to look at our current promo video?
It was shot and edited by a friend of mine that used to be the media director at our church.

[Chuck Engels]

And I hope you are planning on using some of the great motion backgrounds we have here at muvipix

[Dave McElderry]

Sorry Chuck. I got off on a tangent and never returned to talk about your video. I did watch it, twice. I think it's great. It's short, reasonably fast moving, and in a series of short snapshots shows the ministries of the church. You also obviously have a lot of talent and good equipment to draw from. Were you involved in the ediing?

I like the idea of a "TV commercial" length, or slighly longer, video that could be produced at fairly regular intervals. How often do you produce these short ones? They would be less labor intensive, and could be like updates to what's presently happening. This could be more effective, in my opinion, than what we're about to undertake. It would be something to bring up in our brainstorming sessions. Does you church also produce longer videos to be used for visitation, for example?

[Chuck Engels]

I wasn't involved in this video at all. We do have excellent cameras and equipment to work with as well as very talented people.

We do all sorts of stuff, about 2 videos a week of some kind. They have done long ones and short ones, here is a good example of some of the stuff we do

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTJdY8PB5Gs[/youtube]

There are a lot of other examples here
http://www.youtube.com/user/VisionCastM ... ay/uploads

[Dave McElderry]

I loved the close-up of the goat towards the end. I think it was the tongue that did it. I was nearly on the floor laughing. Great shot.

[Dave McElderry]

Update on this project...

We're getting ready to do interviews. As much as possible we're planning to keep them pretty much short and sweet. We will have no more than a half dozen people, and we'll try to keep the content to specific results. We were able to procure some professional lights, which will help greatly, and we're trying to get a second camcorder (also Mini DV) so that I'll be able to cut back and forth in the final edit from a couple of different angles. I have a wireless lavalier mic.

We're having a dry run this Saturday to get the bugs out from a technical perspective and to see if we can figure out how to properly use the lighting. Then the Saturday after we're scheduling interviews over a several hour period. If anyone has any suggestions about any aspect of the interviews - technical or otherwise, it would be greatly appreciated.

[Chuck Engels]

Hi Dave,
Thanks for keeping up up to date on your project.
Can't think of anything specific to add at the moment.
It would be nice if you could have both cameras to test for your rehearsal.
The quality between cameras can vary drastically and too much variance is bad.
It would be terrible to go through the trouble of shooting with two cameras only to not be able to use the footage from one of them.

I was trying to find a couple of videos we did that had interviews but they might be too old.
It's nice to do the interviews in different parts of the church, inside and out (however outside might not be too good this time of year). Change up the shots and keep the person you are interviewing as the main subject. Most of the time with videos like this you might see the microphone but usually not the interviewer. Unless you are going for a sit down, talk show, kind of interview, that would be different.