Here is the final video in the Freedom Sunday series and the final video I produced for Meridian Woods Church of Christ. Some of this is material from the previous two videos.



Meridian Woods had a goal to raise $50,000 to retire the mortgage on the building. During the special contribution this past Sunday, around $33,000 was collected which exceeded my expectations considering everything that's going on (economy, etc.). That's a huge step in paying off the building and hopefully the remaining amount can be collected soon.

I've been working on a new demo reel. Here's what I've got so far. Of course, it's always changing.

Also looking at vimeo trying to decide if I like that and want to start using that for some of my uploads. So far I like the quality, but not the limits.


Current Stormspeed Demo Reel from Carlin Trammel on Vimeo.

Two and a half years ago, in my second video for Meridian Woods, I had an opportunity to do some sci-fi. Being one of my favorite genres, I wanted to return to it once more before wrapping up my tenure. I wrote this script pulling bits from Star Trek (using a metaphor to explain technobabble), Back to the Future (drawing on a chalkboard), Doctor Who (music) and numerous other sci-fi sources.

There's a running gag at church that's been labeled Meridian Woods Time. That concept is explained in the video. It's something that a lot of people joke about and I felt it played in perfectly to my desire to revisit this genre.

This video was not without a casualty. There was one more thing I wanted to do with this video, but ultimately I cut that out. Which means there is a deleted scene, but more on that in a future post.



There's just one more video to go, but this is it as far as the pieces with a narrative approach. Next week's video is a compilation of interviews.

For about two years I have been formally in charge of the "Media & Communications Ministry" at Meridian Woods Church of Christ. And for a few months before that, I was putting together videos unofficially. It's been a good experience and I've had fun doing it.

However, it takes a lot of time to put these together. Between the writing, wrangling, shooting, capturing, editing, exporting and uploading, I can spend hours on a project that maybe only has a final run time of three minutes. And in light of the upcoming arrival of my second child, I've come to the conclusion that it's time, at the very least, for me to take a break from this. So, I informed the church leadership that I am resigning as deacon over this ministry effective November 2. They had already asked me to put together videos promoting "Freedom Sunday" (a day in which they are hoping to raise the remaining funds needed to pay off the mortgage on the church building), so this series will be my last set of videos for Meridian Woods for the foreseeable future.

It took me some time to figure out what I wanted to do with these, but being my last ones, I decided to take this opportunity to do a couple things I've long been wanting to do. In this week's video, I put together my homage to Sesame Street. This video features Ralph Whatnot and fellow member Kime Landes.



Next week, I'll post the second video which is also is an homage to one of my favorite things ever. It's a fun one as well and has gotten some good reactions so far from the people I've shown it to. I look forward to sharing it here.

In constructing the beginning portion of the Children's Campaign video, I needed to come up with a newscast portion that the family around the table could be watching. I wrote and shot what turned out to be a 90 second newscast piece. My friend and co-worker Shannon graciously took on the challenge of being the news host and the fine folks at WCTV-TV allowed us to go in and shoot on one of their news sets for about 20 minutes one day.

Having already shot the family, I just needed to insert shots of a television with this newscast playing. I just used my personal television for those shots. I turned down the brightness on the TV and set the XL2 to shoot 30p to prevent the horizontal banding. I even borrowed a trick from some TV shows and zoomed in on the screen to increase the tension.

I did a couple cuts on this opening scene. I had one I was pretty happy with, but the newscast referred to specific stats. It was decided that we should make it as generic as possible. Fortunately, I had enough excess newscast footage that I was able to piece together different phrases to make the overall newscast sound more generic. There's one sentence in the final cut that pulls words from three or four sentences in the original cut.

It wasn't wasteful to shoot this excess footage, although spending the time it took to come up with the news anchor's name probably was. Since this 90 second piece got pared down to only about 18 seconds, I thought I would share the entire thing here. For comparison, you can then re-watch the Children's Campaign video intro and see if you can identify where all the sentences, fragments and words come from.