I heard Richard Dawkins, the world-renowned atheist, was coming to town, and thought that I would produce something for him as a “welcoming present.” The result? A 10-minute in-depth video “interview” satire: Richard Dawkins like you’ve never seen him before (www.snipurl.com/dawkinsinterview).

A number of elements are involved in producing such a video and I was asked to share these with you. They can basically be reduced to two: The creative and the technical aspects. A third could be added, the philosophical, which undergirds the other two, but I’ll only touch briefly on that.

The creative

The creative side is quite hard to talk about as it is intangible and subjective. It involves the idea, the inspiration that pops into our head, and the nurturing and crafting of that idea into something substantial. While ideas/inspiration often seem to come out of nowhere, the process by which these ideas become videos (or books, or articles or songs or paintings, etc.) is something we can practice and improve on throughout our life.

I am not a fan of the “discover your gift” type of idea, where you try and figure out your personality-type and present interests, so as to determine what gifts God has blessed you with. Such a mentality tends to lock us into only what we know of now, and shut doors on what may be. We should, of course, use the abilities we know we have at present, but also pu rsue our interests with passion so that we can develop new skills for new tasks that we may come upon. God may very well surprise us and open doors which enable gifts we never dreamed we had, to be exposed and developed.

For example, it wasn’t until I was around 30 that I began writing. Till then I didn’t really know I could. It started with a single letter to a newspaper, which literally launched me like a rocket into writing to various media. To start with, letters took hours to write as I sweated and slaved to develop my ideas clearly and concisely and get a pleasing way with words. But I thought that, seeing as I could be speaking to tens of thousands of people through these letters, it justified my spending time giving it my best shot (for those who are interested, I have written a paper on writing letters to print media: www.snipurl.com/write).

This letter-writing ability has recently begun to be utilized in scriptwriting. It wasn’t until I was 55 that I held a video camera for the first time, as a result of a vision for a project I had. I had never till then dreamed I would be using this medium.

So, in short, do all you do to the glory of God, treating it also as personal development. Go to it with perseverance and passion developing all the diversity of creative skills and insights you can. These skills and insights can be turned to good use in many different ways once you have them. A good book to direct you overall in this regard is Isaac Botkin’s Outside of Hollywood: The Young Christians Guide to Vocational Filmmaking.

Technical tips

Technical matters are easier to talk about and so I’ll pass on a few tips I have learnt. I am new to this so these things are still fresh to me.

Audio

One very important thing to realize, rather counter-intuitively, is that video is primarily an audio medium. If you have great picture and lousy sound you have a lousy video. But if you have less than perfect picture but good audio, it can still work. Of course the aim is to have both good picture and good sound, but never forget that good sound is absolutely crucial and will drive virtually all productions. Do not treat audio as of secondary importance.

Script

In the light of this, the script is everything. So far I’ve found it takes me about six weeks to write a 10-minute script for YouTube. 10 minutes – the YouTube limit – is for me about 1,800 words. Once that number is reached in my draft, the pressure is on, as I think of other good ideas to include, to cut out what is less important in favor of what is more important. Only what best moves the “story” forward should be in the script. Sometimes an idea for a video pops into my head fully formed, and just needs honing. Other times I’ve had to sweat to make it come together.
As a script is developing, I pass it by a number of other people to get their critical thoughts on it. I ask them to be as hard on it as they like. This can be discouraging at times, but it’s better to be beaten up by friends so as to avoid being beaten up later by enemies who will show no mercy. I’ve been told by a number of people that my videos should be shorter. That’s something I need to work on.

Research

I started into video only four years ago. I knew nothing about it and began the steepest learning curve in my life. First I bought a book on my summer holiday to get me underway, the Reader’s Digest The Complete Digital Video Guide by Bob Brandon. It is an excellent book covering the whole range of things necessary to know for video. I highly recommended it as a comprehensive starter. Once I got home, I wanted to get up to speed as fast as possible. In such situations, my approach is to seek out those who really know their stuff and ask their advice. The web provides almost unlimited scope in this regard, and so I found such people on a simply amazing website. It unfortunately has just gone offline but was really humming when I started. I freely acknowledge the huge debt I owe the participants in that group, especially Guy Bruner  (who now runs a new discussion group at www.camcorderuser.net ). I produced my first DVD for sale about one month after buying my first vi deo camera and could never have done so without the help of Guy and the others on that group.

Cameras

You can spend a lot of money on gear, something I’m not inclined to do. However I do want good gear and so I have constantly been seeking to make good choices when purchasing, to get quality for minimal cost. I have not done any recent research in this area so I can’t advise on the presently available cameras other than to emphasize doing a lot of study before buying. Again, Guy Bruner’s site www.camcorderuser.net may be as a good place to start.

Microphones

You need one or a number of microphones, because on-camera microphones are not good enough for decent recording, and normally you need your microphone far closer to your talent than you want your camera. I took advice here also, first buying a reasonably priced shotgun mic, then because I got to film a number of weddings, bought a number of cheap lapel microphones that run to MP3 players. With the latter I was able to mic the officiant, the groom, fathers of the bride/groom, podiums, etc. At a wedding, every place that speaking is going to be done from needs to be mic’d! If you are going to be recording outside, you will definitely need microphone protection. If you live or will film in a windy location, you most likely will need a microphone blimp to remove the wind noise from the microphone. Microphone blimps out of India (on Ebay) are fantastic for a really low price.

It is very important to learn about audio for video, so you could buy, for example, Great Sound for Digital Video by Jay Rose. A good website is www.Juicedlink.com which has some great tutorials that give basic audio instructions. There is a lot to audio and it’s something that needs to be learnt if you’re serious about doing video.

Lighting

Lighting is critical and I’ll recommend two resources I have found extremely helpful. The book, Lighting for Digital Video & Television (3rd edition) by John Jackman, and the DVD How to Setup and Light Great Looking Interviews (using a light kit that costs under $1500) by Vortex Media. The DVD is quite expensive, but really is excellent. I highly recommend it. I’ve have largely followed its advice through buying the lighting gear recommended. This allows me to do basic three point lighting, or any other configuration I want.

For great deals on lighting Ebay is a good place to go. I recently got a wonderful bargain on a versatile piece of lighting gear – it is called a “126 LED on-camera light” – from Ebay, at a fraction of the price of other models around.

Green screen

Ok, so you have all your gear. Now you may need a place to shoot your productions. We have a large spare room which I’ve set up as a studio. From very early on I decided I wanted to be able to shoot against a green screen as this would allow me to put whatever background I liked behind my subjects. I use a custom 2.7 meter wide green screen paper which I roll down as my backdrop when filming. I light this with eight 1.2 meter diffused fluorescents tubes. Even lighting on a green screen is important. One thing I’ve learnt with green screen filming is that because it is so easy to place any image you want (video or still) behind your talent, there is a strong temptation to put an image there to show off, rather than to support the talent. No image put behind talent should compete, or distract, or detract, from the talent. Rather it should always enhance the talent, or place them in a location that enhances the content of the video. In my Dawkins video, I used a “cloud” image I made up Photoshop - guided by someone’s Adobe tutorial on the web. It turned out to be a professional looking but neutral background, and I think highlights the talent nicely.

Photographic Composition

Two things are critical in terms of composing your shot:
1)Following the rule of thirds: you shouldn’t generally position the people or object you are filming right smack in the middle of the frame, but instead should have them more or less on a ‘third’ line. Read up more about this, then apply it. It makes shots much more visually interesting.
2)Head and nose room: if you are filming people, you need to provide “Nose room” – there should be more space in front of the person’s nose than behind their head. “Head room” is also important – there should be minimal space above the person’s head. It is acceptable in close shots to even to cut off the top of the persons head with the frame. If you were to divide the frame into horizontal thirds (the rule of thirds) a person’s eyes should be roughly on the top third line.

Editing

Then of course, once your filming is done, it needs to all be brought together in your editing program which may constrain you in some ways depending on what program you use. I use Sony Vegas Pro which is a top end, but reasonably priced product – which I find fantastic and which provides no constraints. For those just starting out, there are movie editing programs which are much less expensive, or even free. IMovie for the Mac is part of ILife which costs $80 and Windows Movie Maker for the PC is free from Microsoft.

Then of course to do any video editing you need a pretty powerful computer and large hard drives, but they are becoming almost standard these days.

Christian communication to a secular world…

For those of us who want to communicate a Christian message into a secular world, there are a number of pitfalls possible in regard to the message. Most Christians are immersed in the Christian subculture of their church/denomination, which has its own language forms and culture. In my experience, few Christians are good at communicating the Gospel to others in ways that are free from jargon or the cultural preconceptions/qwerks of our group…if they do it at all! Thus we may easily present a wooden, preachy, or culture-bound statement that can be heard, but doesn’t really connect with our hearers. This is an enormous problem and I would recommend the book, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity by Nancy Pearcy as a guide to understanding one of the greatest hurdles we have to overcome in communicating the Gospel within a secular culture. It is also why the biblical model we should follow is that of the Apostle Paul speaking to the secular philosophers in Athens, rather than Peter’s ay of addressing the Jewish, biblically-literate crowds in Jerusalem.

Never such a time as this

There has never been a day such as ours when such fantastic tools have been available at such reasonable cost to so many people. What is going to mark you apart from the rest is not the tools you use (except if you’re a show off…though that is not the sort of marking apart you want!) but the dedication, biblical insight, and persistently-honed and developed creativity and skills you bring to the task. I am a project orientated person and learn best through doing real projects. I’ve had the opportunity to film five weddings, and used these to the max to learn filming and editing techniques. Such projects are a great way to acquire skills.

So…communicating a biblical ethos through film or video is a huge task but an interesting and exciting one, one that requires perseverance, understanding and insight. If like me you’re a beginner at it but see its value, go to it with all your might, give it the best you’ve got, to the glory of God and the extension of his rule.