Churches are following the rest of the live production world and moving to a cinematic look. You see it in sports, awards shows, concerts, theater, and more. Shallow depth of field, high dynamic range, and new compelling camera angles are now the norm.
For churches, making the leap to a cinematic workflow can involve baby steps, as it did for Chase Oaks Church in the North Dallas area of Texas. Chase Oaks' Production Director, Paul Mitchell says their first step into using cinematic cameras was with VariCam, which is able to shoot broadcast style and also provide a more cinematic look. He says they offered tons of flexibility to integrate a broadcast flow with cinematic cameras. However, Mitchell says after a few years, they decided the church was ready for the next step – a full-on cinematic camera system.
Learn more about the journey from a broadcast-style look, to hybrid cine, to full cinematic video work flow from Paul Mitchell, production director at Chase Oaks Church, Plano, Tex.
For a more dramatic look, Chase Oaks Church often outfits their Red Komodo cameras with stills lenses via the camera's EF mount.
“We saw the Red Komodo as a way to get more cameras in the space and more dynamic range,” Mitchell explains. “Instead of having everything on tripods, we wanted to add a lot of movement to the system with smaller cameras fully cinema system.”
Together with senior leadership, the production team investigated many options and chose to move to the Red Komodo Compact Cinematic Camera system to add more cameras because they wanted to engage with their in-house and online audience in a different style of production. Mitchell says, “We wanted to move away from that look of everything’s in focus, we wanted a shallow depth of field, a big range to capture super bright lights and super dark areas – just the nature of what that live environment looks like.”
He says cost was also a factor and they chose Red to simplify things so they would be able to work on a smaller platform that was easier for their volunteers who range in age from 14- to 60 years old. A typical weekend service has seven camera operators and a team total of 15 people. Using the EF mount from Canon the church is also able to use lenses from their other cameras and use them on the Komodos.
Image quality was also a factor. With a dynamic lighting design, they wanted to focus on controlling the levels and monitoring exposure more than just by the eye. “We have a dynamic lighting design and a very group of worship leaders. Our goal is to make all of that look as good as possible,” Mitchell explains. " We want to make sure the dark areas are dark and the bright areas have a soft roll-off. But more than that, we wanted to make sure everything in-between was exposed well.”
The switch has also helped with content creation. “Komodo is great because we can take it outside our services to produce other content, interviews, music videos --- anything we want,” he says. “It’s easy to move to different shoots. We are able to use the same tools in and out of our services. The outside-the-room stuff is really where we are pushing to engage our audiences.”
The switch has also helped with content creation. “Komodo is also good because we can take it outside our services to produce other content, interviews, music videos - anything we want,” he says. “It’s easy to move to different shoots. And using the same media - not changing cameras is easier for the team. The outside-the-room stuff is really where we are pushing to engage our audience.
"Also, The RedCode raw codec has been a game changer for us in post," Mitchell adds. "Recording in raw has allowed us to make mistakes when shooting, then dive into the details in post-production so we can make adjustments and better utilize these cameras in our services and other content we produce.”
