Project Spotlight - Grace Church 20th Anniversary | Part 1
How We Met Grace Church
Sarah and I are Cleveland natives but we spent 6 years in Dallas, Texas where I picked up my first camera and HMM was born. During our time there, one of the places we found ourselves most connecting was Grace Church. That’s where we found friendships, a place to belong, and a place to stay connected.
April 2025
Fast forward to April 2025, I receive a text from Tim, Grace Church’s administrator, asking if we’d consider helping them put together a video celebrating the 20th anniversary of the church. Of course my immediate answer was yes but I had no idea how complex this project would become or how many pieces would fall into place to make it as great as it became.
The anniversary was in November. It was currently April. We had 6 months to decide project scope, land on the creative direction, and begin scheduling shoots, flights, hotels, rental cars, etc. April and May were a flurry of zoom calls, during which a main concern of mine was finding ways to build out the project in such a way that Grace Church got the biggest return on investment. We decided we would go from Saturday to Wednesday in August so we could capture a Sunday morning and still have plenty of days for key interviews.
The deliverables on this project grew from just a primary ten-to-fifteen minute Anniversary video to include a short edit of the film as well as a new brand photography gallery, several ministry spotlight videos for the website, as well as various needed short announcements that were convenient to capture.
We began planning the right dates in August that would work to get as many people interviewed as possible. It quickly became clear that many of the people who played pivotal roles in this 20 year old story were now spread across the country. Some were in Virginia, others were in Arizona and Colorado. It wasn’t realistic to expect we’d get everyone all in one place. That’s where the first part of our project began - video calls.
Video calls
We used StreamYard to record video interviews with 5 founding members of the church. Thankfully you can record full 1080p video on each end of the video call which all gets uploaded to the platform. I was able to grab those local recordings and use them in the primary film. My assumption was that a low quality online recording, while necessary for the storytelling component, would look jarring or detract from the overall video when placed alongside our 4K footage. I was very wrong. Not only are the story components fantastic, the zoom video feel gave it a more genuine and unassuming feel which added a nice rhythm throughout the final film. An interesting use case I wouldn’t normally be ok with but I’m very pleased with the end result.
In the meantime, we booked our flights, hotel, car, and rental equipment (thanks Lensrentals), and were off!
Saturday - August 9, 2025
Travel days always feel like a mix of blur and anticipation. It had been a year since our last project in Dallas and we were excited to be back. Thankfully, we always bookend our travel projects with travel days so there’s not usually a ton of pressure to show up at any particular time when so many variables can affect the schedule. Our flight left Cleveland at 11:50am and we landed in Dallas around 1:38pm. We made our way to baggage to pick up our suitcases and equipment. It was a longer trip so we each had our own suitcase, two checked equipment bags, and our carry on camera hardcases. Our hands were full.
We grabbed our rental car and in 40 minutes had made it to our hotel in Frisco. We drove over to the church to see a few people and organize our rental equipment before grabbing some In-N-Out and calling it a night. We needed rest before this project got rolling the next day!
Sunday - August 10, 2025
Sunday began early with a quick hotel breakfast before heading over to Grace Church to get our cameras set up and ready to begin filming and photographing. The morning priorities were:
Capture morning music rehearsal
Capture pre-service prayer meeting
Capture pre-service hangs at front doors, coffee bar, kids check-in, and in auditorium
Capture footage and photos of both services, specifically
Music
Preaching
Volunteers
Child dedications
Kids Ministry
Membership class
As soon as the morning services ended, we only had a short time before our first interview began at 12:30. With all the hustle and bustle of the morning, none of our interview setup was complete! We rushed to get upstairs to our first spot in a room called The Loft. We barely had enough time to get our key light up and ready before our first interviewees arrived.
Our camera setup consisted of 3 angles. Our A-cam was the Canon C70 with DZO CattaAce 35-80, our B-cam was the Canon R6ii with RF 28-70, and our C-cam was a handheld Canon R5 with 70-200 for tight detail shots. We decided to ditch the overhead boom mic and stick to lavs running to our DJI mics. This helped us move quicker and still maintain high quality audio capture. We also utilized a shotgun mic on our A-cam as backup in case we ran into a failure on one of our lavs.
We began interviewing at 12:30pm and did not finish until 8pm. Sunday was a marathon of content but this project had only just begun!
Monday - August 11, 2025
Monday began with a ride along with Craig Cabaniss, the planting pastor of Grace Church. We met up at the church and loaded into his car and off we went. For the next several hours, Craig took us on a roadtrip around Frisco to see the various places Grace Church had met from the very beginning. We started with the first house they rented when they moved from San Diego, then a hotel ballroom, then a number of schools, a converted commercial space, all the way up to where they are located now on Frisco Square.
The car ride itself became an interview set. Craig had a hot mic while I sat next to him with a camera and Sarah sat in the back with another. We filmed him, we filmed each location, and we filmed Frisco.
Arriving back at the church, we began setting up for Craig’s formal interview in the church lobby. For the next hour, as Sarah masterfully walked through the series of pre-written questions, we began to hear stories we had heard many times but in so much more detail than we had ever heard before. It was in this interview that we began to realize just how powerful this anniversary story was to be.
After Craig, we had more interviews until evening. We moved from the lobby to the nearby tower room which sits inside the bottom of the church bell tower. After a few more interviews there, we moved to a cozy counseling room down the hall. While I got us moved, Sarah took a break and grabbed us some coffee from our nearby favorite Summer Moon! We finished the night with another pastor - Kalib Wilkinson - and another couple who had been at Grace from the very beginning.
Tuesday - August 12, 2025
Tuesday began early so we could capture a morning men’s coffee group at the church and get some shots of the sunrise behind the church tower. We quickly transitioned to capturing more interviews with past and current staff, interns, volunteers, and longtime church members. We finished our final interview with Tim Payne in the auditorium before wrapping up the primary content portion of the project!
All that remained was some general photography and videography of the building which we would complete the next day before packing up for our return to Cleveland. For now, we were invited back to Tim’s for some great pizza and hangs. The relaxation hits hard at this point when the primary content is captured and you can see the production finish line.
Wednesday - August 13, 2025
The exhaustion hit hard Wednesday morning. Thankfully with primary production out of the way, all we had left was final shots of the building exterior and interior and a few timelapses I wanted to get done. We decided to sleep in a little before grabbing coffee at Renew Coffee N Bakery on Frisco Square. Feeling caffeinated, we moseyed on over to the church and began capturing our final shots of the project.
One of the more tedious aspects of travel projects is the equipment rental situation. For this project we rented lights stands, boom stands, and a key light. This is larger equipment so it requires more boxes for additional components and accessories which can make packing up more complicated. We always do our best to put everything back exactly the way it was shipped out to us. Thankfully, Lensrentals has always taken good care of us, even when some components ended up in the wrong box.
We finished packing everything up, changed into fresh travel clothes, said our goodbyes, and left Grace Church behind. We made a quick stop at Fedex to drop our rentals and then headed to Dallas Fort Worth Airport.
We flew home to Cleveland after 4 days of shooting, 30 interviews, 2563 photos, 3.35TB of video files, and tired bodies.
Production was complete! Post-production was about to begin!
Keep an eye out for part 2 to see how our post-production process played out for this project!
