Our lead pastor came to us wanting bumper videos for an "awkward family Christmas" sermon series.
Awkward family dynamics pointed straight at mockumentary. The Office, Parks and Rec, Modern Family. Chris Yarber and I talked it through and decided to go for it.
The people in the videos were our own church members, and the congregation knew every one of them.
That's most of why it landed. The same script performed by strangers would've gotten polite laughs. Seeing someone you sit near every Sunday being deadpan on camera is a completely different experience.
If you take one thing from this, it's that. Cast people your church already knows.
Me, Chris, and our friend Lane.
Chris handled script supervision. Lane and I ran lighting and camera. I was DP.
Three people is enough for something like this, as long as everybody knows which job is theirs before you start.
We shot on a Sony a6400. Not the ideal camera for this, and it did fine.
Two things to know if you use one. No in-body stabilization, so handheld mockumentary movement is harder than it looks. And rolling shutter, which shows up on fast pans, exactly the move this style wants.
A Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 gave us range without swapping lenses constantly. What it didn't give us is the sudden aggressive zoom real mockumentaries use as a punchline. That's a longer lens.
Audio was Rode NTG2 shotguns plus lavs. Comedy dies with bad audio. If a joke lands and nobody can hear the line, you don't have a joke.
The style depends on reactions that feel unplanned, so we told our people to improvise and respond honestly to whatever happened.
Most of the best moments weren't in the script.
We shot one main location and worked angles and setups to keep it from looking repetitive.
Comedy is timing, and timing gets made in post. We spent real time on how long to hold a reaction before cutting.
My favorite part was building the opening and closing title sequences in the style of the show. That's what tied the episodes together and made it read as a series.
A monitor for the director. Watching scenes on the back of a camera means you're evaluating performances you can barely see.
And two more people. With three, everyone's holding something, which means nobody is fully focused on the actors. For a narrative shoot the acting is the product.
If you want to get better at the camera side of projects like this, Church Video Made Simple walks through camera settings, exposure, white balance, composition and audio.
50% Complete
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.