Behind The Scenes: All In (Free Resources)

A couple weeks ago at West Ridge Church, we wrapped up a four-part series called All In. This series was designed to share what a fully devoted follower of Jesus Christ looks like and to challenge our church to be ALL IN.

Our communications team was presented the challenge to create a short message bumper for each week that would help bring the topic to life. These topics where: Love, Grow, Serve, Share. What we ended up with was one of my favorite projects I’ve ever worked on with our incredible communications team. Take a look

What Made This Successful?

• We Embraced Constraints
  Before we started brainstorming each video, we put these constraints in place: 60 seconds • No Words • Use primarily kids to tell the story. As creatives, we often make the mistake of thinking that constraints limit our creativity. What I’ve found is that the hiding spot for creativity is when we embrace constraints and use them to focus our creativity.
• Before We Filmed, We Planned
  We made the biggest improvements to the videos during the planning process, not the filming process. It was during pre-production that we worked through storyboards, shot lists, music, and casting to make sure we had all the right elements in place to tell the story in 60 seconds. That gave our team the freedom to walk into the video shoot with confidence to capture the story that was already in their head and on paper.
• Each Week Told A Story
  When we put these videos together, our goal was to create a “Pixar Moment.” In my opinion, no one tells a story better than Pixar. One of my favorite examples of great storytelling is from the movie UP, where they share the love story of Carl and Ellie from when they met to when Ellie passes away. The brilliant part of the storytelling here is that they did it without words. We used that as inspiration to tell these stories.

Free Resource

If you would like to use any of these videos for your church, you can download all four of them here. I’d love to hear how you use these! Share your story and email phil@philbowdle.com.