All posts tagged creativity

The Story (Making Sermon Videos Part 2)

By | February 11, 2011 | Video Production | No comments
film

Beginning, Middle and End (and when to break this rule)

Even if your time crunch doesn’t allow a fully written script, you can come up with the beginning, middle and end. Do not underestimate this step!  When coming up with a new concept ask yourself these questions:

  • Where does my story start (beginning)
  • How will it end (end)
  • How does it get there? (middle)

Many times people try to overcomplicate this process. Please don’t. Decide what point you want to get across or what question you want to ask and then figure out how to set it up and how to conclude it.

One thing to consider which does seems to contradict the “beginning, middle, end” philosophy and that is realizing that in some cases the video doesn’t really need to have an end. Now, you think I’m crazy! If you were shooting a movie or short to be played by itself with no explanation you would need to resolve everything, but often the videos that churches find most useful either show just a scenario or leave it open ended for the teacher to tie together.

An example of this is a video we created called “God’s Phone System.” In this video we were showing what it would be like if God had a phone system. Several people called in and through the next couple minutes became frustrated with pressing the correct options and getting put on “hold.” That video doesn’t stand well on its own, but when someone then begins to teach about prayer and how God isn’t like a phone system, it is a home run!

please install flash

Go for the Opposite

Sometimes the best video illustration is one that actually demonstrates the opposite of what you are trying to communicate. Maybe make a short informercial about a product that will supposedly help you to hear from God better. Or maybe an interview with someone that is talking about how they overcame anger but they get mad at the interviewer during the process.

That’s the great thing about video. You can hit a completely absurd angle which gets everyone laughing, and then the speaker can come up and drive home a point about prayer or about how each of us struggle with anger at times even if we don’t admit it.

The NEW MeatloafMedia

By | February 7, 2011 | General | No comments
road

A Blog???

It’s been a long road with MeatloafMedia…my wife and I started in 2005 serving up a healthy assortment videos, images, and sermon outlines.  We did our thing and thousands of churches have used media provided by us to make their sermons more relevant.  A few years later we followed God’s leading produced a short kid’s movie “Treasure Seekers, Inc” which is now being distributed nationally.  And now we are doing our best to follow God leading by stopping the current MeatloafMedia store selling videos and such and transform it into…{drumroll} a blog.

What??  Are we crazy?  Maybe…however I was becoming increasingly frustrated with the “industry” and felt that we could make a bigger impact by just writing out thoughts on a page…or screen, phone or whatever.  The reason that we launched MeatloafMedia to begin with was to help churches become MORE creative.  In the end, however, I feel that we actually helped them to become less creative.

Instead of a church using their creative juices to create a video they might come to a site like ours at the last minute and just download a video…hoping that it would suddenly transform their sermon.  I am certainly not knocking the videos we sold or the churches that bought them, but I started feeling like God has given each church a creative “pool” that they should tap into.

The church that I work at uses video regularly, however I have noticed that the videos that we produce “in house” are always received so much better because it has our own heart and DNA embedded into it.  Wouldn’t it be cool if churches used the creativity that God has given them to create, innovate, and…well, I can’t think of another rhyming word…

Yeah, I know it sounds a bit anti-climatic, but we have decided to take MeatloafMedia in a drastically new direction.  Hopefully one that will inspire and challenge you to use YOUR creative abilities for God and His Kingdom.

This will certainly be an interesting journey, but I invite you to come along…it should be fun.  So, please bookmark this page, subscribe to the RSS so that you won’t miss any of the exciting posts coming soon.