Video: Year In Review

Around May every year our church has an annual business meeting. Last year I had only been around for a few weeks at my job and they asked if we could put together a year in review video. Last year we didn’t have enough lead time or archive footage to pull it off. This year was different.

We began kicking around ideas about 6 weeks out. We established a scope for a 3 minute video recapping the major events and stats from the last year. Then things changed the week of. The project scope was tossed out the window and what we ended up with was a 9 minute video.

Here’s what saved me:
1. I had b-roll from events over the last year
2. We had brought in a photographer recently to shoot footage around the church during a Sunday morning.
3. We had each department head write out a short script to recap their year. We then highlighted what would be delivered on screen and what would be read and I’d show b-roll.
4. I had a years worth of bumpers to pull from for eye candy.
5. I reused some testimonies we showed last fall for small groups.

I had a few challenges:
1. We wanted to highlight our small group ministry but we don’t have a point person over that ministry currently.
2. I had no footage or testimony from our missions trips and our missions directors were over seas.
3. I had 2 working days to pull this off but I ended up working during one of my off days to pull it off.

Not having footage for the missions piece I decided to create a kinetic type video. My first true kinetic type video but I found a tutorial to quickly lay out the text in Illustrator and then bring the file into AE to animate. I got the idea from here
The run down is this:
1. Lay out the text in illustrator.
2. Create outlines from text and ungroup.
3. Group the letters to form a word.
4. In the layers pallette choose release to layers in the options menu. Then drag the new layers out of the current layer.
5. Save the file and import into AE as a comp.
6. Animate the layers position.
7. Sequence the layers to animate in to the audio.
8. Precomp now animate the precomp using scale, anchor point, rotation to focus on the key words. Make sure rasterize continuously is checked so the vector artwork stays sharp.
9. Add motion blur and stylize the background

We got a great response to it. I’ve got some ideas for next year:
1. I need to get footage and testimonies from missions teams when they return.
2. Need a small groups point person as well and time to shoot new testimonies.

Here’s the link to the video