Oak Ridge Baptist Church spring outreach videos

Today, I finished up a DVD invitation for my home church.  The main video is an invite to upcoming special meetings meant for adults in our community.  I did all of the production and post with some help from the church's assistant pastor, Jon Kopp.  We've been making these videos every spring for the last 4 years, and this is the best one so far.  Hope you enjoy watching them!

http://vimeo.com/20959260

Galkin meeting intro and DVD menu

Each spring Oak Ridge Baptist Church hosts a week of special outreach meetings. In years past, they’ve used the DVD format as a substitute for paper flyers or brochures as an invitation. Last year, Braintrust produced and edited the entire DVD. This year, we helped again, but we were involved only on the shooting and DVD creation side of things. With some help from our friend Jeremy Dooley, we used two Canon digital still cameras to shoot time lapse from two angles. From this we created an image sequence, showing the church auditorium filling up before a morning service. This intro that plays when you first insert the DVD transitions to a “Welcome” from the church worship leader and then to the menu itself. The menu contains footage that Paul shot during a service showing the viewer a montage of the activities that occur during the worship at ORBC. You can view the introduction and menu below.

Timelapse intro

Pettit Promo

Each spring Oak Ridge Baptist Church hosts a week of special outreach meetings. In years past, they’ve used the DVD format as a substitute for paper flyers or brochures as an invitation. Braintrust Digital was asked to shoot and edit a personal invitation to the viewer from Senior Pastor Tom Craig. This is the resulting video that was incorporated into the final DVD along with directions to the church, samples of music and sermons, and information about ORBC.

www.orbc4u.org
www.spea.org

Galkin Project Completed

The Galkin DVD is now complete. The team gave final approval of all five videos, and we’ll be sending the final master off for duplication very soon. Below, you can view the introductory video that is the main video on the DVD. This video will be used to introduce church congregations to the team so they can be familiarized with the team members, their background, and the goals and focus of their ministry.

Galkin Project monologue re-shoot

Our shoot on March 28 went very well. It threatened to rain all day, but we only had to stop once for about five minutes while a brief shower passed over. The overcast sky gave us even lighting, and we utilized some silver-coated foam core for a bounce light. We got started almost two hours later than scheduled because we forgot to factor in a one hour time zone change since the team was coming from Nashville. They also had some trouble with their trailers when they were leaving the church in Nashville. Will and Aaron were much more focused and clear during the takes. They had obviously really nailed down what they wanted to say and how they wanted to say it. Since they were both present for the shoot, they were also able to help each other clarify their thoughts.

We had some issues with some strong winds getting picked up in the audio. That ruined a few good takes, but we still had enough good ones to cover all of the thoughts in the script. At another location, there was a woman (apparently mentally handicapped) who decided she wanted to serenade the entire crew while we were in the middle of shooting. Will kindly encouraged her to wait until we were done shooting to continue her concert.

The editing of all of the monologues and pick-up shots that we re-shot is very close to completion. We expect to mail a DVD to the team next week for them to review again. This should be a final version, and we can expect the final delivery of all of the DVDs to be before the end of May.

Galkin Project Re-shoot Preparation

Today we're in total logistics mode. We're settling all of our shooting locations, making phone calls for permissions, checking and prepping equipment, and going over everyone's outlines. Will and Aaron have sent their outlines over, and we're going to give them a little touch-up work to make sure the ideas will be communicated clearly and effectively on camera.

Galkin Project Feedback

The whole team has watched the DVD several times and given us feedback. They found a few tweaks to make that will make the whole program smoother. The major development is that they have decided that they want to re-shoot all of their monologues. After eight months of continuing to develop and refine their message, they believe that they can communicate everything much better. So we've gone from production to post-production and back to production. The whole team will be in Nashville until just after Easter and will be going to the Atlanta area after a two day break. Since Knoxville isn't too much out of the way, they will spend one day and one night here. Before shooting, we'll review their outlines and prioritize the segments that need to be reshot. We'll do all of the ones we can and see how much we can do in one day. It will be a long day of shooting, that's for sure.

Galkin Project Rough Cut DVD Output

We've reached a milestone in the Galkin project. The rough cut for all of the segments of the DVD has been completed. We authored the DVD with Adobe Encore for it's ease of compatibility with Adobe Photoshop. We were able to create the menu we wanted in Photoshop and import it directly into Encore with functioning buttons and all. The team is in California right now, so they should receive the rough copy by the middle of next week.

Y-12 NHPA

The Y-12 National Security Complex is a Department of Energy facility located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Paul produced an extensive historic preservation project for them in 2005 while working there under contract. This extensive video was comprised of 360 degree interior and exterior walk-arounds, long continuous-shot tours of the site, and iPix 360 degree still images. Knoxville Steadicam operator David McCauley did much of the camera work, while Paul produced, edited, and mastered the project for the Y-12 historians overseeing the production. The project was completed in approximately three months. The final product was a three DVD set that can be accessed by the public. The video below will show you a montage of the types of things you can view on the DVD set. You’ll see interface samples, Steadicam shots, and animated iPix photography.

United Test and Balancing (UTAB)

Braintrust Digital partnered with Knoxville producer David McCauley to produce a training series for HVAC testing and balancing. We assisted with rough edit, motion graphics, scriptwriting, and a complex DVD menu. UTAB our client, asked for a mandatory quiz to be displayed periodically during each video viewing. Each quiz question must be answered correctly before advancing further in the video. A one minute clip is available for viewing as well as some screenshots of the interactive quiz. For more information on the entire series, please visit www.tabprotraining.com.

The trainee is confronted at set points during the video with multiple choice questions that must be answered correctly in order to proceed in the rest of the training.

QUESTION

INCORRECT ANSWER

CORRECT ANSWER


After correctly answering each question, the trainee is allowed to continue the video until the next set of questions or the final review.

Galkin Project: Removing the Buzzing Fly

The two monologues that we shot a few weeks ago are proving to be harder to edit than we hoped for. There were a lot of unusable takes in the first monologue, and some of the alternate takes that were good had the same or similar angle to the previous shot making them unusable as well. We tried short dissolves to avoid a jarring jump cut, but nothing worked very well. After a lot of thought and tweaking, we think we've managed to make the whole sequence coherent and usable.

At first glance, the second monologue looked fantastic with some gorgeous backlighting and serendipitous natural bounce light. But upon further review, we found some horrifying problems. The first and most obvious problem was a fly that repeatedly hounded Will by buzzing around his body and landing on his hand. At one point, the fly stayed on his hand for almost a minute. This is way too distracting to be used. The second problem was a result of our "gorgeous" backlighting. Unfortunately Will seemed to have some overactive saliva glands that day. When the spit flew out of his mouth, it ignited like fireworks in front of his face. Not too long ago, this would have been either un-repairable or very difficult and time consuming to fix. Fortunately, we have Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended. This version has a fantastic feature which allows us to open a Quicktime video directly in Photoshop. It interprets the frames as individual layers and provides an animation timeline to make adjustments to each frame. We were able to paint out all of the flying spittle with the healing brush making them invisible.

Galkin Project Footage Review

Will, Christy, and their four children came in on Friday evening and met us at Oak Ridge Baptist Church to review the footage and do a little bit of shooting. We got some staged shots of Will preaching, and some cute shots of their four kids singing some of the songs that they use during their evangelistic meetings. Will and Christy were each a little embarrassed at seeing themselves on camera since this is a first for them both. However, they felt that they communicated their message well. We also enjoyed a little bit of bloopers together.

On Saturday morning, we all went to a local state park to shoot the last two monologues that Will wanted to do. Everything was as we hoped it would be on an early Saturday morning. There was almost no one else there; the air was cool; and the sun was providing some very nice lighting filtering through the trees. Will's first monologue took longer than we had hoped for because the park personnel were using a tractor with a leaf blower attachment to clear off the paths and roads. The noise made it impossible to shoot until they were out of earshot. The second monologue went much smoother, and we had some great backlighting on an old wooden bridge.

After a quick lunch, the Galkins hit the road again, and we went back to post-production.

Galkin Project Logging Footage

Our harried week of shooting in Wisconsin is behind us now. We were able to get all but two monologues shot. Our next step is to begin the logging, capturing, and paper editing. Will, Christy, and their family will be traveling through the Knoxville area in August, and we will shoot the two monologues in a half-day then. This will also provide an opportunity for us to show them the footage that we've captured and edited so far.

The footage we shot in Northland seems to have turned out well. The audio sounds clear, and the sun cooperated with us to give us good natural lighting most of the time. We noticed a few distracting elements on the video and audio side. Fortunately, we have extra takes or alternate clips to choose from.

After we've had time to go through all of the footage a few times, we'll make some notes and pull out key ideas expressed by all of the principal characters in the video. In a few weeks, we'll have a phone meeting with Will to discuss these ideas and figure out the best ways to expand and capitalize on them. If we all did our jobs right, then the ideas expressed in the video will match up with the message that the team wants to communicate.

Galkin Project Shooting

We've been on location in Dunbar, Wisconsin since June 20, and things are going well. We've captured some of Aaron Coffey who handles the children's and teenager's programs for the team. He recorded a message directed to each age group, and we also got some good b-roll of him interacting with the kids. Will arrived at the beginning of this week from North Carolina, so we're settling on shoot times with him for this week. In the evenings, we've been setting up two cameras in the gymnasium to capture some of the team's musical performances. The sound crew at the camp has done a stellar job at providing us the audio recordings.

"Surviving Tomorrow" audition

Brigham Thomas is a Knoxville area actress, who was a semi-finalist in a competition to become a co-host for a TV show entitled "Surviving Tomorrow." Braintrust produced this video for her to highlight her skills for the show's producers. This video had a very strict budget and time frame, and we did the whole thing from concept to completion in less than a week. "Surviving Tomorrow" is currently airing on the Discovery Channel, and is now called "Crash Lab." For more information on Brigham, check out her agent's website at www.talenttrek.com.

Aerial film work

Periodically the Department of Energy does aerial surveys of their sites in the Oak Ridge, Tennessee area. There are several reasons for this including getting a bird’s eye view of how the topography of the sites are changing over time, seeing progress on construction and demolition projects, and historic preservation. The sample shown below is a short montage of some of the 16mm footage Paul shot from the skid of a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter.