Church Welcome Video

At my church my main responsibilities include communications and connections. The two often overlap and many of my projects have the dual purpose of communicating so we can connect with others.

We recently launched a new version of our website. One of the main focuses was to make everything as user-friendly as possible for someone not familiar with our church or church in general.

I’ve visited my fair share of churches and its always intimidating to go into a new place not knowing where things are. In fact I’ve pulled up Google Street View lots of times to make myself familiar with the surrounding area of a destination I’m going to.

With that in mind I wanted to create a video for new people to not just learn about what our church does but actually show them where things are. I wanted to answer questions like: What does it look like inside? Where do I go if I have kids? Where are the restrooms?

If we can give people more confidence about what they’re getting into and get them excited at the same time then we’ve accomplished our goal.

One of the keys for this video was to shoot it live on a Sunday morning. I wanted potential visitors to actually see how everything looks and what is happening. We could have shot it in an empty building and controlled the environment more but you would lose a ton of energy and authenticity.

While we have a very talented film maker at our disposal (Stover Films – check out some of their other awesome work) you don’t need to have professionals to do this. Shoot a simple video with your phone’s camera. Visitor’s having access to see what they’re getting into would love you for it.

• We shot the video on a Canon C100.
• I wore a wireless lapel mic. (While we didn’t use it on this shoot, the Rode Smartlav which plugs into your iPhone is an amazing and affordable option.)
• The music was licensed from The Music Bed
• Video was edited in Final Cut Pro X
• I color graded it  using a VSCO perset in Adobe Lightroom

Let me know if you have any questions or comments.