By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail – Benjamin Franklin

Since I started making videos and films about 16 years about, I have definitely learned there are a few keys areas that I need to execute well in order to accomplish the result I want:

INSPIRATION

It doesn’t always come naturally. It does require effort to find inspiration, in some ways it’s about finding your happy place. I don’t subscribe to the theory that you wait to be inspired to do things. In this industry you either can produce the goods or you can’t. No one is going to care that whether you are inspired or not.

That being said it is important to stay on top of ideas and always have a few ideas brewing in your mind. For the Hillsong conference 2010 promo I got the idea for transitions between the pictures and preachers from seeing the slide mechanism of a slide projector, the way it flicks to white for a few milliseconds out of focus before it brings in the next slide. Of course the way my slides move through isn’t exactly what a slide projector does, but that’s where I got the inspiration from!

What I get inspired by varies, and it can from very different places. I am usually inspired by visually interesting concepts and shapes and how light bend through different materials. Or robots! I looove robots

IDEAS ARE FOR FREE

When I wrote my Easter film for 2009 I wrote down about 20 ideas before i finally settled for the one i decide to make my film about. My film ideas ranged from the absurd (Jesus anime cartoon) to the very sweet (story about children). Not all of them were good, but they at least I know i had the ideas ready to go.

In the end it was the scene “If only one thing didn’t happen” from Benjamin button (a movie by david fincher) that helped me settle on my idea.

When I watched this scene I decided to port across the concept that perhaps God uses all these little incidents to bring you to him, and that it is so intricate that every moment is orchestrated to bring you closer to Him. Hence why I wrote the movie “The Orchestration of Salvation”:

Write down as many ideas as you can, it doesn’t cost you anything! Don’t worry if people say they are dumb. By gathering inspiration and ideas, you’re subconsciously building you’re own style of what you like and subsequently what kind of work you will eventually BE LIKE! So make sure you find a journal or an ipad and jot every single idea you have. Whatever you do, don’t judge them, just write them down, cause you never know when that idea will grow up to be a big ol film like “the matrix” and then you can finally buy that island you always wanted

PART 2 COMING SOON!

Hey guys,

So I have been on the road for the last few days with the Hillsong Live guys doing the video components of the tour. Right now I am sitting in a carpark somewhere in Spartanburg, South Carolina

Check out this video blog to see what else we’ve been up to:

Hillsong LIVE tour blog #1 from Hillsong Church on Vimeo.

So thank you to everyone who was able to come out to Hillsong Conference 2010 this year. It was pretty epic and it was waaaaay too much fun in my opinion. If you missed out on it, you can see the highlights:

Hillsong Conference 2010 Sydney Highlights from Hillsong Church on Vimeo.

In other news you can check out a brand new website from Hillsong called “HILLSONG COLLECTED” which features a whole lot of blogs from people in the Hillsong Ministry plus exclusive content you won’t find anywhere else. Yours truly is a blogger, so feel free to check there from time to time for some cool stuff.

Hillsong conference officially starts in about 2 weeks and it’s going to be manic, but I thought I might share with you what has been happening. I am currently working on a secret album project which will be unleashed unto the world very soon, and grading this bad boy has been a treat. But one thing is certain, I need to start getting this video tutorials up again.
I was recently apart of the churchmediadesign.tv film festival headed up by Brad Zimmerman which I believe was quite successful for its inaugural run! Yours truly was a one of the entrants with our little film “The orchestration of Salvation”.

Anyways if you’re familiar with the works of Jonas & Francois (makers of the video clips “D.A.N.C.E” by Justice and “Day N’ Nite” by Kid Cudi) you are going to love their latest video clip “Only Man” by “Audiobullys” . I don’t know what it is, but this clip really makes me want to go out and buy some new high tops ENJOY!

audiobullys – only man from EL NINO on Vimeo.

If you head over to my mate Glenn Stewart’s site www.mindscapefilms.com, you’ll not only discover what a talented guy he is, but his excellent use of colour. For a very long time, I used to watch as Glenn would transform something very average looking to something very extraordinary by simply tweaking the colour palette of the images he went for. To the average person you could just try and break it down and go “oh wait, he just threw grain over the top” or “he just did a quick curves adjustment” or “it’s all in the vignette”. But the truth is, there is no “magic bullet” for colour correction (no disrespect Stu Maschwitz, it’s a killer plugin!)

Last year, under the skilled tutelage of Glenn last year whilst colour grading the Hillsong 2009 album, I thought I had learned enough about colour correction to be able to do the grade this year (yes if you hate the grade of the 2010 album, you can blame me!). One of the issues of last years album was the song Yaweh. It was lit this horrible blue colour that not only was solarising on the ppl’s faces, but also turning them magenta. In past situations, if the colour looked bad, you would just turn it black and white, but in this instance, turning this colour black and white simply came up grey! So the only way to salvage the song was to isolate the magenta colour and bring it back to a more skin tonish colour. And seriously, cause the picture was so messed up, that is ALL we could do.

This year however was another kettle of fish!

We had a few songs that we shot with brilliant white light, but when you saw them through the camera, it came up temping as blue! “Well Nick, why not just use the change the colour filter???” haha Eventually we figured we could use the channel mixer filter to push certain colours around and make the colours more what was percieved with on the night rather than what was captured on camera.

Anyways, the point being, colour grading is hard mostly because of this reason : every situation requires a different solution to solve it.
I would love to say colour grading/correction was just doing “this action”, but to good at it is going to take practice. It’s like someone asking you how to compose good music, you can give them a general structure , but it takes some talent, finesse and sweat to make it a masterpiece.

Don’t look for the easy out and just level, throw film grain and a vignette on top of the things and say its colour graded. Work hard for your look and understand what you’re doing. I promise you’ll be pleasantly surprised

There is no secret I have been dabbling in the idea of doing 3d in after effects for some time now (mostly because I can’t be stuffed learning a 3d package) so I have been trying to find some cheap ways to create some exciting 3d without using a seperate 3d app at all and just creating them wholly in After effects. That being said, the after effects render engine is pretty limited and there are some obvious restraints, but with a little perseverance I believe you can create some very interesting things. Check this sample vid I created :

View on Vimeo.

I’ll post a tutorial on this soon and also the transformers one, but until then, stay tuned!

View on Vimeo.

Hey everyone,

This year was the 2nd year of our annual Hillsong Easter Art and Film festival – The eXchange, and it was a major success!!
You can vote for the films and art at theexchangefestival.com. I suggest voting for “craft of Innocence” by Jess Balda. I got to narrate it!
Yours truly entered a film this year, but unfortunately didn’t quite making it to the final voting polls. But nonetheless I thought I might show you my entry anyways! enjoy

It’s been a while, but I finally I am trying to make this blog routine a little more regular.
So apologise if you have been coming back and not find a whole lot, cause to be honest, I really haven’t been stuffed to do a whole lot.
So right now, we’re in the middle of doing the 2nd conference for the women at church called colour your world. You can see the promo for next years here (made by the amazing Jordan Ironside, I did the titles

View on Vimeo.

We’re also cutting the new album for Hillsong this year, which is looking really great and cannot wait to unleash it unto the world. I would love to show you some of it, but yeah… I don’t think that it would be a great idea.

Also Canon have FINALLY released the new firmware update for the canon 5D. You can head over to prolost.com for all the news!

I got some fun stuff coming up tutorial wise, and I think I found a better way to make my transformer! yeeew! stay tuned!

Happy 2010 everyone,

Sorry it’s been so long, but I have been extremely lazy and highly unmotivated
But that being said I wanted to share with you what’s been on my mind [and heart] lately. Over the last few weeks I have been able to work with some of the great guys and girls here at Hillsong church and we have put together this amazing presentation of the heart our church is heading into. I love it! Of course I am slightly biased cause I helped make it, to me it is also a great testament to the fact that what all this is about – the videos, the graphics, the mad skillz- it’s ultimately all about God and people. I think if we keep that as our motivation, I think we can change this planet for God.

Now without further adieu, here is the video :

View on Vimeo.

I saw this video a while back, but while perusing motionographer.com I found myself compelled to share this with you guys.

It’s a talk by Stefan Sagmeister (prolific graphic designer with a cool accent) about the benefits of taking time off and how to re-energise yourself creatively. I watched it feeling very inspired to take on some of these practices in my everyday life as I am sure we all suffer from creative block from time to time. One thing I run into time and time again with people in full time ministry is the issue of burn out, and a lot of times it comes down to just managing your downtime well and just giving yourself time to reflect.

Anyways, as with anything, take it with a grain of salt, but I hope this gives you something to at least chew on