Flipped: A Sermon Series on The Sermon on the Mount

The Sermon on the Mount is probably the best-known, but least understood and least followed, of all the teachings of Jesus. It is challenging and yet refreshing. We all are called to live differently from the world around us. As citizens of the Kingdom, we represent the King. That means our conduct, our character, and our heart should be different. This week at Cornerstone, I will be starting a 12-week series on The Sermon on the Mount.

I tried to find good graphics for the series, but I couldn’t find what I wanted. I finally decided to make my own. I got design inspiration from a church in Winston-Salem, and then came up with a title and video opener for our series. I’m calling the series Flipped, because Jesus uses this sermon to turn everything upside down. Here’s our opening video.

If you want to find out how I created the video, keep reading.

I’ve shared before (here and here) about making videos using Apple Keynote. I seriously thought about purchasing Apple Motion for this project, but I decided that it would require too much time to get up to speed. Keynote is Apple’s alternative to Powerpoint, and it has a lot of power under the hood. This entire video took 2 hours start to finish. I liked the color scheme on this video, so I loaded up a screenshot into an empty slide in keynote and found the color values (I love the color inspect tool built into Apple’s color palette)  The rest of the video is simply based on transitions and entrance effects. It took a little tweaking to get the timings right, but I was pleased with the result.

Finally, I exported the slideshow as a quicktime movie. For detailed instructions on how to do this, check out this link. To add the music, I loaded this into Garageband as a movie project, and added one of the built-in sound clips. The sound clip isn’t my favorite, but I didn’t want to spend any additional time looking for another one. I tend to be a perfectionist and sometimes it is hard for me to realize that it is “good enough.”  Overall, I’m really pleased with the result.  I’m looking forward to a great series based on a great passage of Scripture.

If you want to see how I managed the timings and transitions, you can download the original Keynote file. Leave me a comment if you have any questions.

I have also included the title slide and background slide as well.