One of my tasks this week has been cutting together the church nativity. For the past few years, we’ve taken to doing this using video rather than trying to stage a live production – less time required for rehearsal, no worries about a key actor being unavailable on the day and a chance to make more use of it by showing at several events. On the other hand, it does then introduce the new task of video production, which is quite time-consuming in itself.

Last night, I took the first draft and added a new narration track provided by some of the young people and leaders. Next year, I want to try doing the narration track first and then filming against it as a lot of time is taken cutting out slivers between words to try and make the whole thing fit into the available footage time and have some semblance of words and actions fitting together. Then, for polish, I wanted to add some sound effects and music.

Originally, I’d planned to play the music live but I realised that I wasn’t going to have time to make a good stab at that. However, I remembered that the program I was using to splice the audio (Logic Pro X) has an extensive loop library and I was able to harvest what I needed from there – such as sheep baa-ing, cattle lowing, a brassy stab for when angels appeared and a few other things, such as a plane taking off (for the start – it is a sound full of anticipation!).

Music also came from prebuilt loops. I’d intended something with a more seasonal feel but, as it is fairly much in the background, I’m reasonably pleased with the result and I was able to furnish ‘moods’ from moving along to pausing to reflect and a bit of EDM to catch everyone by surprise when the outro offcut plays. Job done!