So I have been deliberating on what are the most common (but easy to miss) mistakes that people make when you start out doing videos.
I have narrowed them to five. I have called them “the terrible five!” dun dun dun.

1. Bad audio - This for me is one of the biggest deal breakers in making your video either the best thing or the worst thing on the planet. It doesn’t matter how good your video is, it could be shot with the best prime lens on the RED camera and graded by Glenn Stewart himself, if the audio is crap, it will be percieved as pretty… erm crap…
Pay attention to your audio. it will save your life.

2. Title safe - I hate, I HATE, when people don’t pay attention to title safe. When you make your videos, make sure you titles are within the title safes. For me there is nothing that screams more “I don’t know what I am doing” than making your titles OUTSIDE title safe. Get the titles inside the lines guys, it’s not that hard!

3. Over exposed footage - When you’re out in the field and your shooting your footage, overexposing your footage is what I like to call “destorying” your footage. In reality you can grade things in post to give that overexposed look, but you can never go back the other way. Once you lose that detail, you lose it forever. Digital video (apart from shooting red) gives you little or no latitude when exposing things,  so if you are losing that detail in the view finder, you’re gonna lose it when you bring it back to the computer.

4. Bad lighting – This is an area that a lot of video professionals seem to neglect a lot. Lighting will set the mood and tell your story better than your camera can. It can take some time to set up right, but once you get it, every shot will look like a million bucks and then it means less time in post grading and more time telling your story!

5. Too many fonts! - if you wanna show people how terrible you are at video design (or just design in general) just use too many fonts. It’s so simple! Start with comic sans and work your way to windings. The more fonts you have, the more amateur you will look!but Seriously keep it simple. Choose one or two (at most).

And with that I will leave you with this amusing video on local commercials:

There has been A LOT happening atm, which has been completely awesome. I have been working a lot on the animation for the Hillsong Kid’s Curriculum which has been really fun! I hope I can post some of the work up once I am done.

I have also been informed that the DVD we made for conference “the making of church news” has been well received everywhere we’ve shown it so I am pretty pumped!!! For those who don’t know, it was a DVD resource for churches showing a lot of of how we do the videos for Hillsong (particularly for church news).

Well I thought I’d share with you this time a little video my friend made a while back. Her name is Annette Sicari and she is a very talented writer/director. Definitely one to watch for in the future. The film below is called “Bruno” and was the winner of the “I Heart Little Italy” film festival + the people’s choice awards. Enjoy!