Suncrest decided they would start the year off with a challenge to hear from God everyday. Part of this goal is to have the church reading through the E100 Bible reading plan together. Since we live in a technological society, we decided that the best way to do this would be through the Youversion Bible app so that people could follow along. The clear option was to make this video to help people get stated using Youversion. Now that I’ve taught you how, you could go sign up too!
Lessons Along the Way
This project was pretty straight forward. For scripting it was just a matter of walking through the signup process, capturing it and making it look nice. If you’re wondering if that’s my voice on the voice over, you’re correct! Since I’m no longer working in the Suncrest office, I’m going to have to start building a network of voice over people to help me with projects. Maybe continually hearing my own voice will help me pursue that faster!
Principles of Design
1. Making a screenshot video. The foundation of this entire video was the actual tutorial video showing people how to sign up for Youversion. From there, I just used a camera in AE to make things a bit more interesting. For the screen recording I just used Quicktime player. I know there are other applications out there, but since I wasn’t recording audio for this screen capture, I just kept it simple with Quicktime, which did exactly what I needed it to. No having to spend extra money on a fancy screen recording program! One benefit I had was that I’m using a Retina Macbook Pro, so the screen recording came out at 2880 X 1800, which gave me more than enough room to zoom and pan with the camera.
2.Helpful tips for screen capture. 1. Turn off notifications. Since I was going through the signup process, I kept getting emails after I would submit information. I was able to work around it on this video, but I could see that being a pain in different circumstances. 2. Clean things up. Us designers tend to have pretty cluttered menu bars and desktops. It’s not really a huge deal but if you just close some of those menu bar icons and temporarily shove those desktop photos into. 3. Hide the dock. If you hide the dock it will give you more screen real estate, so you can make whatever program you’re using bigger, which means you’ll have a larger source video, which means you’ll have more room to work with!
3. Using depth of field with After Effects Cameras. Under the camera options in an AE camera, there are five that you’ll need to utilize to get good results with depth of field. They are Zoom, Depth of Field, Focus Distance, Aperture, and Blur Level. You start by setting your zoom level, and turning on the DOF. It’s also good to go ahead and add the blur amount you’d like to use throughout your video. From there, it’s just a matter of adjusting the Focus Distance for each frame to make sure it’s properly focused. Another tool is using the different camera views to help nail focus (image 3). The viewer has two boxes showing you where the camera is angled, the smaller box adjusts as you adjust the focus distance to allow you to see where the camera is focusing. Since this project was just a flat video, I didn’t use it that much. If you were working with multiple items in 3D space, this could potentially be a lifesaver!