Nicodemus

John 3:1-8

Another video from the misunderstood Bible passages series from February and March. This is the passage about being "born again." The status of "Born Again" is not just relegated to a particular political branch of Christianity; all followers of Christ are reborn in the Holy Spirit. This video doesn't address any of the misperceptions of the term, it just presents the relevant passage of scripture, setting up Will to dive right in.

This video was a lot of fun to shoot. We got to head downtown Austin to shoot footage of the town and shoot the conversation. The two actors are good friends, so they just sat there and talked while Alex and I pointed video cameras at them. We shot the conversation at the patio of the coffee shop located in the Frost Bank building on Congress Ave. It was during SXSW, so there was a lot of stuff going on, tons of people downtown, and just a great fun energy down there. It was great to get out of the suburbs for an afternoon. We shot everything handheld (obviously) with two cameras shooting the action. We spent maybe 10 or 15 minutes shooting the conversation, then walked around downtown shooting the sights for a while.

Post production turned out pretty easy. The music is my band, Amid the Crash. The edit was basically a throw together, off-the-cuff kind of thing. All the footage was handheld and rough, so I wanted to make the editing style match, and try not to over-think it.

The spot where I almost got stressed out and bogged down was with color correction. We did a poor job of matching the two cameras in the conversation shoot, so the shots were all over the place as far as exposure. It was going to take a lot of work, a lot of back-and-forth, and tons of time to get everything within a useable range. Then one of my volunteers (and great friend) Jenn suggested making it black and white. Voila! A potentially two day job became a one hour job. Desaturating everything took away all the color issues, and 90% of the exposure issues, and gave the video exactly the kind of look and feel I was hoping for.

I've generally avoided B&W for video in the past because B&W video usually looks kinda cheesy to me. But the HVX200 shoots such great footage that it came out relatively film-like once I was done with it in After Effects.

So all-in-all, it was a really fun project. I got to hang out downtown in my favorite city and shoot footage on a couple of different afternoons, and the final product served the weekend event well and drew the congregation into the topic of the weekend.