ROCKHARBOR Church Identity Piece

Over the past few months I have had the privilege to be apart of telling a huge God-story through film – ROCKHARBOR Church’s journey.

The Filmmaking Process:

Being new on staff I barely new my coworker’s names let alone the history of our church… I knew this was going to be a huge project.

We began the story with Todd and Lisa’s interview in their home. We filmed with them nearly a month before the rest of the interviews. We were still a little unsure what we were aiming for at that time and thought we were on track for a history video. With this we had the core of what would become our outline for the film. They touched on the major events that lead the church to where it is today.

I worked through the nearly 3 hours of footage from that day. It wasn’t long into the editing process that we were certain this footage wouldn’t work as the centerpiece for the video as we had initially hoped and possibly not in the video at all – it just felt too long-winded.

Nearly fifty sticky notes ended up on the office wall to timeline all of the significant events from our history. We had to narrow the hundreds of events down to the most important moments. It wasn’t long until we realized a history video just wasn’t a realistic video to make. Covering such a vast range of topics and events sounded like a feature length documentary rather than a short inspirational piece.

We began to reevaluate the purpose of this video and concluded the purpose was to share our identity as a church. We settled on the idea of sharing our 5 core values. Attached to each core value would be a life story as how that value is being lived out in our church today. We would then incorporate backstory of that value where possible.

We gathered all the right people and stories, 12 in all. Shooting began and we gained such momentum I quickly had a rough cut ready to view. Still missing were the topic transitions Todd (Lead Pastor) would share to tie the video together but we were sure we didn’t have what we needed from the original 3 hour shoot with Todd and Lisa. We planned to film Todd all over again. The morning of the reshoot with Todd I decided to come in early.

I sat down and my computer and had what I would call an “inspired” couple of hours. I decided to go back and look through the original footage we had shot of Todd and Lisa and ended up finding everything we needed to complete the video. The footage we already had was perfect.

This wasn’t the cleanest production process, but it’s so cool to see how God brought all of the pieces together in the end.

Posted // December 6th, 2010 in // Creative Process // No Comments