Compassion Video

A video sharing statistics from 2013’s Compassion Offering. Produced while under the employment of Suncrest Christian Church.

Suncrest Christian Church has a compassion offering that is taken every year during their Christmas Eve services. The funds that are brought in from the offering are used to serve people in the local community. This year, they wanted a video to show the impact of the Compassion offering in 2013.

This project didn’t go quite as expected. When the original idea came up, the plan was for me to lead the project and have another designer work on the video itself, with me overseeing things. Unfortunately, due to busyness in his schedule, he wasn’t able to take on the project, which left me to produce the video. The goal then became to meet the quickly approaching deadline with the best looking video that can be made.

1. Follow the audio. You’ll notice there’s nothing special animating the text. Because of the different time constraints, I wanted to get the script in and figure out the pacing, and then I’d come back and animate it. However, as I was laying out the script and text, I realized I liked the text just appearing with each of the bell hits. My favorite part was the “This year, we want to say thank you,” that worked perfectly with the audio. If you get a good track and base everything off of that, you’ll wind up with some good results.

2. Master Trapcode Particular. If you’re not familiar with Particular, it’s the industry standard particle system generator for After Effects. In this project, I used it to make the little white circles floating in the background. Particular can be used for so many different things. For this video, I decided to make some subtle particles the background since they were pretty quick to make and look pretty good. I also had some fun after the video was done and made a free motion loop out of those particles which you can find here.

3. Always proofread your work. After the first time this video aired, there was a small typo found in it. I can’t say it enough. Always proofread your work. For whatever reason, Abode products don’t have spellcheck, so one thing I do is type things in Evernote, because then spell check should catch any errors. I also highly recommend going through each line of text frame by frame, and rereading through things to make sure some words didn’t slip by. Lastly, getting someone else to watch it before it airs can be a lifesaver. Since you’re staring at the same video, things can slip by your eyes since you’ve gotten used to how things look. An outside perspective can always be helpful.

4. Marking ins and outs. The key command “Option + [” and “Option + ]” allow you to set the in and out points of a layer based on where the playhead is. They came in handy a whole lot in this video.