Create a triple wide visual experience that shows Victory Church's impact currently and through the years to accompany a live Warr Acres performance of the song "I Was Here".

 

Watch the finished version below.

Now below you can watch a side by side by side of the performance video, wide shot of the stage, and the camera switch feed from the control room.

It took over 1500 assets in the end to create 3 alternate versions of this video in two different sizes.

Two versions were a standard 1920x1080 and the other was the triple wide screen size of 3065x720.

I didn't want to loose resolution for either size. No comprimise so I built my comps at 4598x1080 pixels. For those that don't understand, that is very large. Which means more work for the computer to process and render each frame. But by doing 4598x1080, I simply cropped the sides in AE to get the standard HD 920x1080 and the scaled 4598x1080 down to 3065x720 using Compressor for the wide screen.

 

Below are frames from the video and explanations of how I achieved certain things.

First Final Cut Pro X was used to create a storyboard to the song.

Then I created a shot list and broke the shots down by application, difficulty, and priority.

After Effects was used for everything.

All 3D elemnts were created in Cinema 4D and rendered in After Effects using Cineware.

To start the video, I created a background to look like a standard worship fx background. Then recreated the style of the text normally used in a worship experience.

I wanted this standard imagery to slowly glitch away until the universe appeared underneath. To create this transition, I used Cinema 4D and the Greyscale Gorilla plugin Transform.

2D images of galaxies transition to the world and the title.

The world and stars were created in C4D using public ultra high resolution images provided by Nasa.

The lens flare transition is used multiple times throughout the video.

I created it using Video Copilot's Optical Flares plugin.

This shot with the faces in the stars is actually 2D composition with a 3D camera.

The "blue marble" earth rendering is different from the version of the earth I created in C4D for the title.

It also was downloaded from NASA complete with an alpha channel.

The stars are just on a plane in the background.

This was literally the last shot I finished for the video, and there's a lot more I would have like to fix and do to it.

But time did not allow so it is what it ended up being. I'm fine with that. It still made the point.

This was another transition that I built inside of C4D and exported for use as a luma matte inside AE.

I wanted a sense of the shot crumbling as segue into the shot of the Haiti earthquake.

This was the very last shot I worked on. I believe it gets the point across. However the four photos that were used to compile this larger shot were very crudely blended and no time for adjusting perspective. In haste I didn't find any moving elements that worked with the shot, so I added falling debris stock footage and made the camera shake. I think the shock value of this may help take attention away from the lack of excellence.

This transitions which I call "Upward Triangles" was the first thing I created in AE as a luma matte.

Using two elements from Digital Juice's Motion Design Toolkit, I manipulated and duplicated them, offset and retimed them to create this upward advancing triangle/diamond shapes.

For the second thing, after creating the 2D luma matte transitions, I went to work on the Earth Zoom shots, 5 total for the different versions of the video. This process is fairly simple and straight foward. Video Copilot has a great tutorial from like 2007 that is still very relevant on how to create this effect. I pulled the satelite images from Bing which uses NASA source images. I liked the color and quality of their maps vs Google. Each shot took about 20 screen grabs. Starting all the way zoomed in on the target, step one zoom level out and take another screen grab, and so on until you see the whole continent. The images get stacked and blended using mattes. Add a 3D camera to fly up from the surface and some cloud layers (from NASA as well) to fly past the camera as is rockets up. That's it basically. Oh and the text was create in C4D and positioned in 3D space to line up correctly with the map.

This scene was fairly simple. The earth and moon are stock footage from VideoBlocks. The video frames are from Digital Juice. The stars/galaxy in the background was from NASA. This was a 2D scene but it doesn't feel that way which is good.

Since this scene had lost of older footage, I wanted it to have a retro feel but it still needed to fit in with the space theme. I did this by using high-tech frames from Digital Juice and adding tv scan lines to the clips. The metal rods that the tech frames are mounted to was created in C4D using Cineware.

Similar to the scene of the Haiti earthquake, this tornado scene happened during a break in the song so these were used for emotional punch. The Moore tornado and others this year were very devestating and Victory Church was instumental in the disaster recovery. In the following scene there are a number of shots of the recovery and cleanup.

 

I Photoshopped the panorama to fit my comp size and removed some unwanted buildings and concrete to allow for the tornado to have a path. In AE I added storm clouds, a cloud chamber effect, a US flag, and the twister to create the composition.

The text "Leave" actually transitions the scene from a 2D AE shot of an earth zoom to a 3D C4D shot of the earth and the text. This and the remaining shots were created completely in C4D and rendered through Cineware.

This shot was created in C4D using around 130 photos and I don't remember how many names of places. It represents only a fraction of the people and places impacted by Victory Church since it began.

This shot moving through space shows a number of places and people impacted throughout of the years.

And one more upward transition to reveal the logo.

It was a great project that challenged me and turned out pretty well.