In March of 2020, our team traveled to Barcelona to film a project for our church’s missionary team–only to get cut short as we fled Spain at 2AM the night the US announced travel from Europe would be banned due to COVID (a long, (not-so)fun story for another day).

Well, after about a week of quarantining & finding out we weren’t positive for the virus, we geared up for another shoot – this one for our Easter Service.

At this point, the concept was locked, the spoken word was recorded and mixed with a music track, and I had just finished creating an animated piece that would play on the LED wall on set. (This was streamlined thanks to the incredibly talented Ezra Cohen who is constantly releasing beautiful content for creators at ezracohen.tv)

Our desire was to create a 120 second spot that reminded our church of our lives before Jesus, and bring our church to worship as we remembered how we have been redeemed by Christ’s death, burial and resurrection.

We wanted the first half to feel confined, trapped, dark, chaotic and defeated with shaky, tight camera movements. So we built a big wooden box, hoping it would create a “coffin-ish” or caged in feeling and we stuffed Roberto (Talent) and Kris (DP & CamOp) into the box.

To contrast, we wanted the second half to feel a bit more expansive and bright with smoother, sweeping camera movements. One of our congregation locations has an existing LED wall, so we decided to use that to our advantage. Unfortunately we couldn’t lower the LED wall (it was about 8 feet off of the ground), so we brought in some temporary staging to bring our camera and actor up to the LED wall. It worked pretty well, except that budget only allowed for about a 24 x 16 foot stage. This was just extremely limiting when we were wanting much wider shots.

Our crew absolutely nailed it, though and I couldn’t have been more proud of what our team was able to create!

Director / Producer / Editor – Colton Holmes

Executive Producer – Donovan Golden

Actor / Performer / Writer - Roberto German

Writer - Brett Land

DP / Cam Op - Kris Rutherford

AC - Brooks Birdsall

Grip & Electric - Keaton Loudamy

Grip – Jesse Witt

DIT / Grip - Aaron Campbell