Gracepoint is giving away our Small Group video for free to any church. From the get go, we wanted a small group video that anyone could use, and would work with a variety of target audiences with nothing really specific to Gracepoint. I hope you enjoy the fruits of our labor and find a use for it in your ministry. It was quite a fun experience. Enjoy!
~Conrad
As part of a recent effort to advertise our small group ministries, a bunch of us created a small promo video that was largely inspired by a video on Skechtravel. After some experimentation, we ended up using After Effects to create the animation behind it. Richard, a talented graphic designer (and the man behind our awesome stage designs), created the assets in Illustrator. The animation was keyframed in After Effects and was a mix of 2D and 3D cameras. Music, sound effects, and foley work was created and mastered in Apple Soundtrack Pro. Final output was done in Final Cut Pro 6.
The decision to use After Effects was a difficult one. We initially wanted to use the recently released Motion 3 after attending a session of the Apple Final Studio 2 Tour. The 3D camera in Motion was incredible. In the past, I had a lot of problems with After Effects' 3D environment because I often lost my feel of where I was in 3D (being more accustomed to packages like Maya and Softimage). Apple's 3D environment in Motion was refreshing. However, one key feature was missing. We could not easily import Illustrator paths into Motion, and there were no tools to morph paths. So it seemed After Effects still had a leg up when it came to mask manipulation (due to the big emphasis on rotowork in the last two releases).
Finally, given our deadline (1.5 weeks), I went with a solution that I knew would work. We did the entire video as a single composition (and pre-comps) in After Effects. Given how there were continuous transitions in the video from one scene to another, there was really no way to render out clips that could be edited together in FCP. Unfortunately, we had to time all the animation to audio inside After Effects which was painful since AE isn't really designed to scrub audio very well.
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