Springtime in most places signals the end of the icy cold grasp of winter and the beginning of something new. Flowers are blooming, the weather is improving, and there are lots of pastel colors everywhere. In addition to all of these wonderful things, you know Easter is right around the corner. For most churches Easter is probably the most well attended service of the year. They may have one chance to make an impact on a first time guest so they want to put their best foot forward. Of course, that means the Easter design for the service requires a bit more attention than a Hail Mary thrown the night before. Side note: it’s a great idea to treat every service like it was Easter. Really great idea.

For Easter 2019 at The Sanctuary, the theme I was working with was “Canvas of Grace.” Immediately my mind went to the idea of Jesus being the painter of the blank canvas of our lives. So I fired up MS Paint…just kidding, but it did feel relevant for a second. First, I played around with the main graphic in Photoshop for awhile until it was tweaked and approved over a few revisions. Then I imported the graphic into After Effects and started playing with the idea of drawing/writing/painting. I wanted the strokes to play into the canvas/painting idea and drive the point home.

For this project, I created quite a few files. For social media, I made a couple of promos for the Easter egg hunt and basket giveaway. These were quick announcements and formatted for the Instagram square. For the service, I created several videos/stills for the Lyrics Projectors (4:3) and Environmental Projectors (custom masked out area but essentially 3072×728). The videos for the project included: countdown, intro, per-service loop, giving, sermon title, and sermon visual. Even my daughter was involved with the sermon illustration. Overall, it was a super fun project and really great day.