Hi Indigitous Serve supporters!
My name is Addison, and my day job(s) includes producing and editing videos for seminary, church, and missions organizations. Yes, I’ve spent a lot of my time in the last few years after college using the gifts and talents God’s given me for ministry. Joining the Serve Cohort has been a real blessing to see how we might be able to combine our faith and work for God’s global mission.
That’s enough about me, though. Right now, I want to share with you what it was like to produce our video for the cover page. (Check it out if you haven’t already!)
A few weeks after we began the cohort, I was asked to help with leading the support-raising effort. Hey, this was a good opportunity to get us all together to make a video! But this came with a challenge as we were all remote and each student would have to film themselves from their own location. On top of that, how are we all going to get a consistent and decent composition, lighting, and audio?
Post-Production – Turning ideas into words
There were two major components that we needed before anyone could begin filming their videos:
- Instructions on how to film yourself.
- A script or outline detailing what we would be saying on video and what would show up in the final, edited video.
To keep things simple and consistent, everyone was required to shoot with their smartphones. The instructions included some very basic use of the camera app, including which way to orient your phone (landscape mode) and shooting in HD and not 4K video (because these files can be very large). Other tips included in the instructions were how to set the right lighting for your face on camera and how you can make your own kind of tripod stand with books or objects lying around the house.
In this digital age, it might seem like second nature for many when asked to film a video of themselves. However, in my experience, I’ve found that clear and thorough instructions to be extremely helpful with both production and post-production.
The Script
Script-writing is no easy task, especially when I try to say enough without saying too much. When writing for a support video about a novel topic like digital missions for young Christians, there was a lot I wanted to share with you about the history of Indigitous and the origins of this Serve Cohort. We also wanted to describe our current partnership with Joshua Project on presenting information about the Frontier People Groups. We wanted to inspire our audience, supporters (like our aunts and uncles from church), and our peers to consider and share how faith transforms their work, too. This video needed to be informative, but it also needed to convey to our supporters our heart for God’s global mission and for this work.
Production – Smiling for the camera!
We were on a time crunch, and I had originally assigned everyone a weekend to finish recording themselves. This may have been too rushed for many of us as even recording a minute of good (enough) quality video can take nearly an hour. I was reminded to exercise patience as I messed up take after take and as I waited for the rest of the team to go through the same process. Everyone managed to turn in their videos in less than a week! (Praise God!)
Post-Production – Building the story
Okay, this is where most of the heavy-lifting is done. It was now time to flex all those editing muscles I’ve built up through videos for my day job and ministry.
This was the time to really put the story together. As a missions support video, the tone we were setting was going to be important. I’ve seen plenty of missions videos tugging at the heartstrings and inadvertently guilt its viewers to support. Our mission to share about how frontier people groups have no access to Jesus’ gospel was essential as the hook of the video, and sharing that message could easily have fallen into a somber tone. While it’s heartbreaking, there is so much more hope and light that Jesus brings with the Great Commission. Being on mission, at any stage, whether learning, going, sending, mobilizing, or praying, shouldn’t be a burden but rather a joyful calling that transforms how we engage our world globally.
From a technical standpoint, one of the more ambitious challenges was using a lot of typography and animation to convey our message in a memorable and impactful way. I made tons of design choices and revisions as I shared each draft with the Cohort. In fact, if you have any feedback or suggestions, let us know!
The video is far from perfect to me. However, I learned a lot of new, cool editing techniques and got to see the more embarrassing sides of some of my fellow Cohort members! My hope is that this video will show our supporters just how exciting and innovative Indigitous Serve is for God’s kingdom mission!
Addison