CU 125th Anniversary from Cinevita Films on Vimeo.
This was my first historical documentary video, and I thouroughly enjoyed working on this project. Being my first historical documentary, it stretched me creatively. It was a great collaborative video project, and the results of working with great people really show in the finished project. This piece was played recently at the 125th Anniversary celebration in chapel at Cedarville University. One of the most difficult parts about this video was reducing the time to 10 minute, and equally as challenging, supporting the story with interesting visuals. Cedarville’s history is rich, deserving of a full-length documentary, but we were limited to 1o minutes. The problem is that most of Cedarville’s history has not been documented well visually, considering the university was founded in 1887. I wanted to find a way to creatively show the picture we had to work with, without simply showing a slide show. I decided to print out the pictures, glue them to foam core, and hang them from C stands in front of Cedarville’s archives. The old books provided a great texture for the background, and hanging the images and moving the camera around them added a unique, almost 3D effect. The movements had to be very subtle. For the movements I used the Kessler Cineslider and Revolution Head, powered by the Oracle controller. With the combination I could perform very subtle, complicated 3 axis movements that would have been impossible by hand. I did a review of using the Kessler Cineslider and Revolution head for camera movement here.
It was great working on a video that has such a great story. Cedarville’s story really is amazing, and Jodi Jackson did a great job writing the script to this video. It made my job so much easier. Visually, this was a very creative piece to work on, as there was such a variety of visuals and formats used in this video. Everything from film to Beta Cam footage, HD cameras, DSLRs, scanned pictures, photographed pictures, time lapses, all of it creating such a visual variety.
CREDITS:
Narrator: Matthew Moore
Interviews: Dr. Paul Dixon
Dr. Bill Brown
Dr. James Jeremiah
Producer: Joel Tomkinson
Writer: Jodi Jackson
Editor, Videographer: Bradey Jobson
Videographer: Heather Jobson
Audio Engineer: Taylor Valarik
Archives: Lynn Brock
1990’s footage: Dick Kindig
Titles: Zac Dixon
Special Thanks to:
Bob Rohm, Chad Jackson, 125th Anniversary Committee
