15 Year Anniversary Documentary
Church: First Family Church
Submitted by: Brett Stiles
Church Size: 500-1,000
Location: Ankeny, IA
Category: Narrative/Concept
Camera: Sony a7sii, Magic Pro 2
This is a documentary we made celebrating the history of God’s work in our church, both historically and relationally. We shot the entire thing on a couple Sony a7sii’s and used a Magic Pro 2 for the aerials. For everything outside of the interview portions we specifically chose to shoot at focal lengths 200mm and above because we wanted to capture natural community and interaction between people without them even knowing the camera was around. The biggest challenge was how can we tell a story that spans 15 years that’s cohesive and yet still involve as much perspective as possible from people who were on the plant team, staff who had moved on, current staff, new members, 15 year members and so forth. We stroyboarded for 9 months before shooting and through that 9 month process we actually scrapped the theme we had planned and decided that we would trust that God would bring the theme he wanted out of the interviews. So we shot almost 30 interviews in a span of 3 days and what started as a 15 minute video because a full fledged short documentary at almost 45 minutes but it’s the greatest story we’ve ever told.
Submitted by: Brett Stiles
Church Size: 500-1,000
Location: Ankeny, IA
Category: Narrative/Concept
Camera: Sony a7sii, Magic Pro 2
This is a documentary we made celebrating the history of God’s work in our church, both historically and relationally. We shot the entire thing on a couple Sony a7sii’s and used a Magic Pro 2 for the aerials. For everything outside of the interview portions we specifically chose to shoot at focal lengths 200mm and above because we wanted to capture natural community and interaction between people without them even knowing the camera was around. The biggest challenge was how can we tell a story that spans 15 years that’s cohesive and yet still involve as much perspective as possible from people who were on the plant team, staff who had moved on, current staff, new members, 15 year members and so forth. We stroyboarded for 9 months before shooting and through that 9 month process we actually scrapped the theme we had planned and decided that we would trust that God would bring the theme he wanted out of the interviews. So we shot almost 30 interviews in a span of 3 days and what started as a 15 minute video because a full fledged short documentary at almost 45 minutes but it’s the greatest story we’ve ever told.