Delivered - Series Bumper Videos

Film

Dec 7

the four bumper videos are at the beginning of each sermon below

Concept

In late October, we began planning our Christmas teaching series, Delivered. To provide some context, our church has been meticulously going through the book of Matthew since January 2015, and will finish around December of 2016. It's a macro-series of sorts that we've broken into smaller series along the way. So the idea with Delivered was that we could continue our place in the book of Matthew (which is not the Christmas story), while incorporating a Christmas theme. We decided to focus on the gifts Jesus has brought to the world through his life and death. Bible + Gifts + Jesus, that's a pretty Christmas theme, right? Our tagline, "The best gifts have already arrived," helped clarify this series' approach to the holiday season.

We wanted the series to be fun, as much as it is about serious subjects. We chose to do a video series where a girl kept receiving strange presents from a mysterious sender, to the humor of the audience. To carry the narrative and provide another angle of fun, we wanted to have a grinch-style narration run through the whole series.

Production

I spent two days writing the Dr. Seuss inspired script for all four Sundays in the series. Fun fact: This is the 6th project I've written in this genre, and my reference point is always my favorite Seuss book, Yertle the Turtle. Anyway, we storyboarded the script, hired a vocal actor in England, found our actress for the part of the girl, and prepared the props for the shoot. My wife, Jill, prepared all the packages, which was somewhat of a challenge for the last gift in the videos (which contained a person).

Myself, Jill, and Rachel Lloyd went to the location of the video and shot all four videos over an afternoon. Our actress, Patti Ann, was amazing! She and her family have been a major part of our church since it began, so it was great to have her in the video. And her performance was so good! She took direction very well, was so convincing, and didn't mind doing multiple takes over hours of filming. She was perfect.

Editing was fairly easy. I really like the song we licensed, I think it gives you that magical Christmas feeling without being childish. I added a snow overlay and boom, the videos were done.