The Rosary Videos

About These Rosary Videos

These Rosary Videos are perhaps my best videos to date and also perhaps the most creatively challenging project as well ..??..

It started simple enough with the Pastor saying, “Chuck, I’d like to film my church at prayer.”

Knowing that the audio for this project would be the lead (vs the visuals), I hired an expert at on-location audio recording so we had three mics set up – two stereo mics to capture the congregation and one mic for the Pastor (i.e., my Audio Technica 4041) and brought all three audio tracks direct into a laptop computer running Sonar.

The audio had it’s own issues which I’ll get back to, but the video was the really big issue. None of us had either filmed a Rosary, which is long (i.e., four sections each of which is 20 minutes long and repetitive) and almost like a meditative chant.

Customer Changes Direction

Initially we thought we would film the people, their hands, and the Rosary beads. Thus produce more of a year-book-like video, but once the Pastor saw ten minutes of the first draft of the edited DVD footage, he was not 100% happy with the outcome.

“I know I said let’s film my congregation, but after seeing this video of these people, we’ve kind of been there done that visually speaking. So, is there any way we could apply the screen-saver approach and show my people at prayer mixed in with the spirit of the Rosary? You, know. Some of those really nice sunset pictures and other gentle ambient pics along with the congregation?”

And there-in started my extended creative journey and back to the edit bay.

The Creative Challenge

The Rosary has four sections – The Joyful, The Sorrowful, The Glorious and The Luminous – each of which has five sub-sections, and many sections that repeat (e.g., the Hail Mary 10x).

Some of these sections were seemingly easier to visually score than others – e.g., how to show The Sorrowful Mysteries without defaulting to Gothic or traditional heavy imagery? Jesus dying on the Cross is not a pleasant sight or thought yet in this video, my job was to make it at least compelling enough to pull someone through the entire piece yet also be prayer-like, so using fast edit cuts like an MTV show (or other current TV shows like CSI) was out of the question.

Ultimately, the visual answers came from my extensive image library.

So in the case of the Sorrowful Mysteries, I used images from Native American burial sites, real slave cabins from a South Carolina plantation, Hawaiian burial grounds, various New England cemeteries, plus sprinkled in audio effects like rain, thunder, lightening, running water, etc. All of which are combined and interspersed with shots of the congregation, so the video pulls one through the Prayer without being in your face, yet also subtly reinforces the themes each of the Mysteries portrays.

I mentioned that the audio was an issue – this was unforeseen in that the beads hitting the pews created huge audio spikes that had to be edited out and tamed otherwise the crystal clear audio captured would have been unpleasant to listen to.