For our new series at New Life Church in January & February 2010…we wanted to make sure our perspective was right heading into the new year.  Looking at other people and pointing out their flaws only hurts our walk with God and ultimately – no one wants to be around a self-centered Christian…let alone a Christian who acts like they’ve got it all together.

We wanted to produce 2 openers that had a very good blend of different personalities – and do it in a way that was unique.  We’d seen several videos out there with a technique using masks and cropping to go between several source videos.  The first was from a music video by Sleepwalking called Everything is Made in China – and the second was from a Honda Civic ad titled “Everything“.

We failed completely at producing a video that had the same look – for one main reason.  We didn’t realize how creepy it would be to have 7 people all saying the same thing at the same time while their faces switch back and forth.  We painstakingly had all the actors reading their lines in the same cadence with playback which was rolling in the background – to make sure that we could slice between footage seamlessly.  It was completely creepy – and we spent about 18 hours in the edit process trying to make it not creepy.

No dice.

We had to roll with plan B – which we never really intended to do.  We created 3 separate spots using the same actors – saying some of their original lines.  You can see them below.

To show that we did have a couple wins with this opener – we shot with our new Canon 7D and Micro Red-Rock rig (photos on Nathan Pruzaniec’s Flickr). We also found a use for an amazing song by Kings of Convenience titled Boat Behind.  Toe tapper category.