Stage visuals for a mashup of the songs Pray by Sam Smith, and the old hymn Down To The River To Pray.

The objective was to display the lyrics of the song Pray in a creative, unique manner. I came up with the idea of a hymn book page burning, because I felt the visual of something burning away aligned with the theme of the lyrics, and the hymn book page matched the tag of the old hymn at the end.

I created this look by filming an actual piece of paper burning away at 120fps. I printed on plain white paper in front of a solid color background, and soaked each edge with lighter fluid.

I knew that a white page would be too bright on the giant LED screen, so I had to make the footage dark. However, I had no budget to create this video, and did not have a printer capable of printing white ink on a black page. So I came up with a creative solution: I inverted the colors of the footage of the paper burning, and then "re-inverted" the color of the flames back to normal.

This resulted in an abstract, unique looking burning page that looked awesome on the stage LED screen.

Filmed with Canon R5. Effects created in After Effects.