"True Love" by Phil Wickham
Directed by Dan Stevers

Shot and edited in two and a half weeks, this video was produced for my church's Easter service journeycommunitychurch.org We built a small section of the wall (5'x6') so the actors could interact with it. The rest of the wall shots were done using matte paintings, rotoscoping, or green screen. Check out my shot breakdown video to see how these effects were created. Each shot underwent heavy color correction to achieve either the somber blue look at the beginning or the orange warm feel for the end. Every shot had a blown out sky in it so I had to go in and motion track the camera movement and add clouds to each shot that had sky.

EQUIPMENT

I used a wonderful piece of equipment called the Poor Man's Steady Cam steadycam.org/ to achieve smooth camera movements. The shots were made even smoother by slowing down the speed of many of the shots to around 70% of their normal speed using After Effects and it's pixel motion feature. I also bought a garden wagon (the ones with the big off road tires) to dolly alongside the actors as they walked. I only used the wagon for one shot in the video, the shot of everyone's feet walking, but it definitely made a difference. We also brought a ten foot ladder to stand on so I could get a top-down view of everyone walking. I purchased a portable greenscreen which had a reversible white side imagewest.tv/index.asp?Pag... We used the white side as a background for the shots of people laying their bricks on the wall. The white background acted the same way a green screen would. For a great tutorial on how to replace blown out skys and white backgrounds check out this tutorial videocopilot.net/tutorials... I shot the video using a Panasonic DVX100b at a 30p frame rate. I created all the effects inside After Effects CS3. I used Trapcode's plug-ins Particular and Shine, to create the wall exploding effect. These plug-ins are indispensable to me, I use them on pretty much every video I make. The video was edited in Premiere.

contact me at: danstevers@hotmail.com