Tis the season to produce Christmas videos! I love Christmas, I love producing videos and I love history, so combine those three things and I am in hog heaven! One of my favorite holiday traditions is Walk Through Bethlehem, a re-creation of the Bethlehem marketplace staged every year by the Woodmont Christian Church in Nashville, TN, where I live. It's a HUMONGOUS historical reenactment of ancient Bethlehem that is attended by about 6,000 people from a multi-state area.
Walk Through Bethlehem is GORGEOUS. The costumes, props and decorations are as authentic as possible. They also bring in tons of animals: sheep, camels, donkeys and other critters common back then. (Did I mention that I love animals?) So naturally, I had to produce a video on the Walk Through Bethlehem. Actually, I got carried away and edited two versions of the video! I just could not help myself! One video is like a news story and the other is more like a music video.
HOW I PRODUCED THESE VIDEOS
First thing I had to do was get permission from the Woodmont Christian Church. Many people do not realize that you can not just walk in someplace with a camera and begin videotaping if you are going to distribute the video in any way. If all you are videotaping is home movies, then permission is not necessary. But a video production headed for the Internet or any broadcast outlet has to be approved. This is ESPECIALLY TRUE IF YOU PLAN ON VIDEOTAPING ON PRIVATE PROPERTY.
You CAN NOT walk into a store or other business and begin videotaping without prior approval. If you do, they have the legal right to confiscate your equipment and have you tossed in the slammer. OUCH! Most businesses will make it virtually impossible for a video crew because they do not want to lose control of their public message. So if you call up a store seeking permission to videotape, expect to be turned down. Small mom and pop stores are your best best. Huge corporate stores? Forget it. Getting permission from the church was fairly simple, but not guaranteed. In order to assure a positive response, I had to make sure they trusted me. So when I called and introduced myself, one of the first things I did was tell them exactly what I planned on doing with the video and more importantly, what tone the video would take. Since I absolutely love the Walk Through Bethlehem, I had no trouble convincing them that my video would be 100% positive. I also offered them DVD copies of the finished videos for their own use. That was a deal sealer!
Although I was not quite this blunt, I made sure they realized what I was actually doing was producing a $5,000 video commercial for them free of charge. What a deal! When I arrived at the church to videotape, I first hunted down the person with whom I had made arrangements. Often, this liaison person will want to follow you around the entire time you are there, just to make sure you don't do anything they do not like. In this case, the gentleman had other things to do and was not worried about my sincerity so he showed me around and then let me wander. I got him to sign a legal release form saying I had permission to videotape and put the resulting video on the Internet. Now comes the fun part! I wandered around for several hours, videotaping my little heart out. It'd be easier for me if I were an invisible fly on the wall with my camera, but since I'm not, I have to explain over and over again exactly what I am doing. I ask individual people if they mind being videotaped. I avoided taping the crowd and concentrated on the participants. I did this because I had blanket permission to tape the participants but that permission did not cover the crowd. It was really dark in a lot of places and that limited what I could videotape. Lights would have been too distracting and would have bothered people so I just stuck with taping areas that had at least some light naturally. I mostly hand held the camera and didn't bother with a tripod. This was because the place was jam packed and a tripod would have been cumbersome. I used substitute tripods as much as possible. After spending about 3 hours taking video of everything I could, it was time to edit. I did the music video version first. I selected music from Handle's Messiah because I LOVE that music and because it was the most appropriate thing I could think of. I used portions of two different songs and separated the songs with natural sound I had picked up off my on-camera microphone. It took me about 3 hours to edit.
Then, since I had so much good footage, I decided to do the news story version. I wrote up a script, calling the church liaison person back to verify some details. I recorded the narration myself, directly onto my computer. I recorded it in my video editing software, Final Cut Express using the voice over tool. I plugged my inexpensive hand held microphone directly into the computer using a cable that has an XLR audio connection on one end and USB connection on the other end. While editing, I mixed the narration in with natural sound. I love using natural sound because I think that helps the viewer experience the event in the most realistic way possible. In order to get decent natural sound of people speaking, the camera was often right in their face. Seems a bit rude, but I'm friendly enough to keep people feeling comfortable. If I had NOT gotten right in their face, the sound would have been impossible to understand. Some of it was iffy as is, but I selected the best portions to bring up full. I converted both finished stories into MPEG 4 format for upload to different video sharing sites. I choose MPEG4 because it gives a very small file size and still looks OK. Not great, but OK. I sure will love it when the Internet goes completely to fiber optic cable so video on the Internet can be a higher resolution! I actually produced these videos last Christmas but I liked them so much I wanted to use them again this Christmas. Video is FOREVER!
Go to my blog to actually see the video.
Lorraine Grula has been a well-respected award winning video professional for over twenty-five years. (Yeah, that makes her kind of old.) Lorraine has done virtually every kind of video production imaginable and now shares her expertise on the web. Her blog, http://www.VideoProductionTips.com is full of free information and video tutorials.
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