Jr. High Week

Last week was insane. Me and a team of 4 other guys made 19 videos in 5 days. I worked 83 hours and probably did more video work in one week than I have in a year. I loved every minute of it. We made funny videos, we made a series, we made highlight videos from every day, and we made time-lapse/stop-motion videos.

I like to view my life like an RPG video game. It's always good to level up. It's always good to upgrade your equipment and knowledge. But the higher level you get, the more XP is required to level up. It's been getting harder to level up lately, but last week I leveled up...several times.

First of all, I learned to delegate. Usually I'm pretty much a lone wolf when it comes to video, but in order to get 19 videos done in 5 days...I had to delegate. Luckily, I had a spectacular media team around me, and they always exceeded my expectations whenever I trusted them to do anything. I hope I can get back the exact same media team next year.

Secondly, it was amazing to see how much can be accomplished in a week with video when me and 4 other guys put our minds to it. Some of the videos we made, especially the ones with Micah's D7000...were pretty stinking awesome. Seriously, I'm not just talking about the quality of the video in the purest sense of the word, I'm talking about the fact that these videos are just as good, if not better, than anything I've ever made before. And we made them all in 12 hours or less! That was all the time we had. There were a couple times when we maybe wanted to color correct better or add something else, but since we were in a time-crunch we could not. But I haven't heard a single person say "Hmm, that video would have been better if..." I have asked for a lot of constructive criticism. I have compared the videos we made last week in a very short amount of time to videos I've made in a longer amount of time, and they stand firm as great videos that are awesome the way they are.

Once again I was reminded why video is my passion. It's the whole process, from beginning to end. You start with an idea and a "oh that would be funny!" thought. Followed by going out and filming the ideas you had and then maybe coming up with more funny ideas as you film, importing the footage to see that some stuff worked even better than expected while other stuff might not make the final cut, editing the footage, adding music, color correcting, fixing errors in filming so that no one would ever know that there was a mistake in the first place, and then finally exporting the video and showing it to an audience. We did that process many times last week from beginning to end in a short time, and we showed our work to an audience of about 200 people twice each day. Normally that process spans over a few weeks and the pure joy of it can get lost because it's so spread out. However, last week it was video after video after video- so much that it was overwhelming at times. But the joy of creating videos and the high that comes with that was non-stop. I can't wait for next year! Thanks be to God for giving us the creativity and strength to do what we did last week. He created us, we created 19 videos. He gets the glory.

Below is our Media Team intro video that we made for the first chapel. There is an annotation on the bottom of the video that will take you to a playlist with the rest of our videos that week. Enjoy!

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