ONE HOLY NIGHT
Getting to the heart of a message
is the exciting part about doing a project that revolves around an already trendy topic. Often times trendy videos tend to focus on the surface level of a topic (i.e. the ice bucket challenge being about the ice not about the ALS support), so when we were approached to do a Christmas music video for our dear friend Marj Desius the COMVcrew was excited to get right to the heart of the holiday.
Cold and Raw
were the first words that came to our minds for this video about Christ. We recognize that Israel, in its coldest months, typically isn’t that cold, sitting at around 35 to 40 degrees fahrenheit. Yet the majority of our audience, for this music video, recognizes the story of Christ around the freezing month of December. We wanted take advantage of that thought of cold to exemplify the circumstance in which Mary gave birth, though not actually freezing, were not pleasant.
Secondly we wanted to move away from the well lit and beautifully organized stable, as typically depicted, and present to the viewer a rougher, more unsuitable stable for the birth of our King. The idea then came to us, we wanted to put to use the amazing technology in the Sony A7s and push the boundaries of light, or the lack there of. We designed the scenes to have the only source of light be from burning fire or emanating from the angelic orbs. It was intriguing to see how the extreme contrast from the utter darkness of the night against these small sources of light gave the scene a hopeful feeling of warmth (shot almost entirely at 102,400 ISO).
We kept the rest simple.
After the vision for the feel of the video was set we realized: that was all that was needed. No crazy camera movement, no choreographed dance moves, just the cold and raw depiction of the simple birth of the Savior. #aSaviorIsBorn
