No, not hand crank cameras but cameras used in filming the movie Crank 2. I have discovered on a couple different websites that a big budget Hollywood film is being done on budget gear. Somewhat of a church budget MAYBE.
The cameras in discussion are Canon XH A1 “consumer” grade HD units. These things sell all over now for around $3000 plus accessories. I just thought it was nice to know that you can get high quality footage (good enough for charging a hefty admission even, haha) at a relatively affordable price. We have two very nice non-HD cameras at church that we paid more than that for in the past three years.
A buddy of mine, Mike, was using one to film some live performance footage of another buddy, David, last night. He digs the camera. Anyone else use one of these? These will have to get bumped to the top of my wish list for production gear… maybe next year.
Well, it has been a while since a worthwhile post came to these parts. I decided I am going to try to get back on the blog-bandwagon along with a couple of other potential web activities that you shall hear about soon enough.
I am posting a video that we will be using in church for the next few weeks as the sermon intro, between worship and the message. The series is “Just Breathe” and it is a 4 week study on the Holy Spirit.
I don’t know if it is good or bad to say that this video is the result of the better part of two days work, spread over a week. The graphic appearing at the end was designed by Chris for the series. I worked backwards from it to animate it and add motion along with all the text. Chris did the initial design in Photoshop I did all the animation in After Effects and created the “flourishes” that grow in the video in Illustrator. The text may change week to week, I am not sure yet.
The music behind it is “The Adventure” by Angels & Airwaves. (I tried posting on YouTube first but couldn’t get audio in there for some reason, so it’s hosted on my site and may take a bit longer to play.)
Although somewhat technical, I definitely consider this blog subject “off topic” but I couldn’t ignore it. I stumbled across an article leading me to this website, which confirms something incredible.
PETA (the animal rights group) is offering $1 million for the first group of scientists to come up with commercially viable and edible meat. Let me say that again. PETA is going to award $1 million to whoever can make MEAT grow in the lab. It has to be distributable to multiple states and priced more cheaply than its real counterpart (chicken).
PETA is willing to help us “gain access to flesh that doesn’t cause suffering and death.” How very considerate of them. What about the suffering of the taste testers? I don’t even want to think about the test meals in that kitchen.
I figured I would share a video from church with the small portion of the internet world that visits here. This is a testimony intro video we played in church on our opening weekend in the new building. I edited it in Adobe After Effects with the chair being hand drawn, scanned & cut in Adobe Illustrator before I imported it to be ‘drawn’ in the video. Our new projection system is widescreen, that is why the video looks cut off on the top and bottom. YouTube automatically letterboxes it. Also, there is no sound. Fred, our worship director, played piano live during the video.
The point of the video I think is pretty self-explanatory when you see it. It set up David Wilkin’s testimony pretty well. Even though there is not much to it, it turned out to be super-effective.
We are getting ready to start a 4 week series in church on God’s love called “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” We were trying today to think of some nice popular and fast love songs to play as walk-in and/or walk-out songs in the services. You got any suggestions? We were struggling. We ruled out the title song because of subject matter IN the song. I suggested “Wicked Game” by Chris Issack, but for obvious reasons that one got axed, along side of “I Wanna Sex You Up” by Color Me Bad when Chris suggested it. A few Beatles tunes came up, but seriously, what else?
I stumbled across this article today on the Consumerist. It ‘confirms’ that coat hangers work as well as Monster Cables for home theater speaker cable. It makes you wonder how many products out there are purely or mostly hype and not so much quality. What do you think? What products are mostly hype?
I feel like I can breathe again. I actually got home during daylight hours yesterday for the first time in probably a month. I sat at home, almost restless, because I have grown accustomed to having a ton of things to do all with the same deadline. Praise-alujah that the deadline has passed and I met the deadline on all but one thing that I can recall. I didn’t have my distributed video working properly. Our camera in service for some reason only wanted to show green on the TVs elsewhere in the building. At 10:45 pm on Saturday night I gave up temporarily. I had already fallen asleep sitting in three different places in the building and realized that I didn’t have it in me to do any more. I needed rest to return somewhat refreshed at 7 am the next day.
I must publicly thank Jerry Davidson and Richard Taylor, two awesome volunteers, for their over-the-top efforts that helped me get everything done. Jerry was everywhere I needed him with regards to getting the sound system up and running and Richard was all over our new lighting system among other things. God always seems to provide the right people for the jobs.
As many of my coworkers have already published (Chris, Fred, Shannon), our first weekend in our new facility went off wonderfully. God showed up in many ways. David preached a message about the bottom line of our church, “never be the same again.” Our desire as a church is to see Christ impact people in life-changing ways. It was awesome to see him do that yesterday. People hit the altar after both of our services, something they have hardly been able to do for a couple years now because our chairs were all the way TO the altar. We are super-grateful for the tool God has blessed us with. Now we need him to bless us with a parking miracle. Come Lord Jesus, and bring parking spaces. We had around 1600 adults in our two services, around 200 middle school students in RushHour and somewhere around a billion little kids in Tiny Town, FamJam and KidJam. It is kind of a scary feeling to open your new facility that was built FOR GROWTH and have most of its resources packed out the first week. I am sure that numbers will drop some after the curiosity wears off, but still, WOW.
Well, since this blog is supposed to be technical, I should say something technical. Our main service went off almost without a glitch at all. The only issues I faced yesterday were wireless mic signals dropping out a bit. Just a growing pain/learning curve. We had 8 vocal mics, 3 speaker mics, 1 guitar and 11 in-ear monitors all on Sennheiser wireless systems in the main room. In children it was 8 speaker mics, in youth it was 3 vocal mics and 2 in-ears. Needless to say, there is going to have to be more frequency coordination. Worship in the main service turned out great. It was awesome to be in the back and see so many people engaging the Lord like that. The music is coming across full and clear, two things I am thankful for. Our engineer from Baker Audio spent a few hours Saturday night tweaking the room system after our first worship service in there Friday night. He was able to finally hear some tings I had been hearing after his last visit and get them cleared up.
So we are one week away from “launching” our new facility. We will have a worship service for our body next Friday night, the 29th, and then our first services in our new home on Sunday the 2nd. On my end of things we have been working with mainly 2 companies, Baker Audio (who also is doing our video systems) and Mainstage Theatrical Supply. I was reading through our bid package with Baker to check and see if we had in fact gotten everything we paid for. I stumbled across an astonishing number (besides the price). In our facility in just the A/V systems (not power or house/theatrical lighting) we have run approximately 40,500 feet of cable. This is made up of speaker cable (Speak-on for the nerds out there), Cat5e network cable, and mostly mic cable. There is 7.56 MILES of signal cable in the floor of our three main rooms. Holy cow. Like I said, does anyone have money invested in copper?
We have had two rehearsals now in the new sanctuary and a partial rehearsal in our children’s ministry’s Clubhouse Theater. Rehearsals in the youth’s Rooftop will ramp up next week. I have to say I am pleased with the outcome. We have three very clear and clean sounding rooms. Two of them are very tight acoustically with almost no natural reverberation and one room definitely has some reverb but nothing abnormal or unfavorable. I posted a while back about getting our new soundboard in hand for training purposes and how much of a difference it had made acoustically the moment we plugged it in. Well, we hadn’t seen anything yet. When we patched into our Meyer line arrays, subs and front fills it was a beautiful thing. Once again we were hearing things that we hadn’t heard before with the same people and instruments passing through. (I want to stress that while I AM an audiophile and LOVE great sound, that is not the drive of these systems. It is our desire to create a space where the Word of God and the Worship of God can go forth clearly and warmly. We want to make people long to come back again to worship Him.)
We also have gone to wireless in-ear monitoring systems for up to 11 people on stage. We have 8 transmitters and 11 receivers. Our plan for now is to have vocalists share mixes. It DID seem like a little bit better plan that it actually is but it still works well. We have one male and one female vocalist sharing a mix with the vocals panned left and right in their ears. I thought this would be a perfect solution but it seems when your voice is in your head and your ears are plugged at -26 dB, you tend to hear the OTHER voice in your ears more than your own. I am confident with some level and balance adjustments we can make nice though. The HUGE plus of the in-ears far out weighs those hiccups though. We are able to get very clean & crisp mixes because there is very low stage volume with no monitor wedges firing at any of our sources. Also, the stage doesn’t look like a disorganized warehouse with boxes strewn about everywhere.
One other big factor in our clean sound is the drum shield we built. I got an idea for it at another church and did some research myself. I’ll post on it separately later because I really think it will be helpful to other churches and theaters trying to control stage volume and not look wrapped in plastic.
Well, thats all for now, kind of a tech update on the new facility for the four of you that care (my parents, my in-laws). Actually, I don’t think they care THAT much, its more of, hey, where have you been the past 3 months and what have you been doing… update.
Guitar heros beware, there is a new kid moving into town. Game Tank is far along in the development of “Guitar Rising.” Rising is similar to Guitar Hero & Rock Band in that the players try to play along with the game’s songs in order to score points. Where Rising sets itself apart is that its real.You plug a real guitar in to your computer and play real notes to real songs. Points are awarded based on accuracy, as you would expect. Apparently its as fun as Hero for beginners AND it teaches guitar at the same time.
I have never played Guitar Hero or Rock Band myself, I have to admit, I am excited about Guitar Rising though. I’d love to think I can learn to play like with a method like that.
A big discussion arose today in the hall outside of my office with 6-7 coworkers today that lasted about 20 minutes. It was centered around whether we should have tryouts for a “team” that was reconfiguring as we head into our new facility. Do we do something as the Church like that, knowing that some people who try will probably not make the cut? Is it wrong for a church ministry to make people audition for something? I was (rather strongly) suggesting that we “pursue excellence” and that individual involvement should not supersede the quality of the service for 250 or so people in this instance. Let me say this now, I am NOT suggesting that I am right, I may be right or wrong, I am just telling you what I think. I am curious what the world thinks. (By world I mean “the seven people who read this blog.” Unfortunately, three of you were in this conversation.)
We toss around terms like pursuing excellence, usually not knowing what WE really mean when we say it. I have decided that pursuing excellence for me is: doing the best you can with the resources that you have. Excellence is relative to culture and resources especially. Think about the widow’s mite or the parable of the talents. Its not HOW much you have that matters, its how well you use WHATEVER you have that matters.
So I guess I should rephrase the question now. In a churches pursuit of excellence, where should it draw the line with involvement? Is it right for a representative of Christ to potentially really disappoint someone who is really excited about participating in something? Also, is the same thing true in all situations? Do you treat vocalists for your adult centered service with the same care that you might with volunteers in a different ministry in the church?
I was discussing this later with one of our AWESOME ministry directors, something that worries me is the potential that the church is being dishonest in the name of compassion & grace rather than being truthful to people. I think about at least three American Idol tryouts I saw where he/she told a story of their church being super positive, loving their voice and encouraging them to even pursue careers in singing. Now these people, who clearly couldn’t sing, stand in front of these judges thinking, “well, my church lied to me, these pros think I am horrid.” Isn’t it the role of the church to help people find their spiritual gifts and talents? That defineitly would look different from just letting people do what they most wanted to do.
Anyway, this could go on forever, each question leads to another question….
So, talk amongst yourselves, what do you think? What do you do?
No, not hand crank cameras but cameras used in filming the movie Crank 2. I have discovered on a couple different websites that a big budget Hollywood film is being done on budget gear. Somewhat of a church budget MAYBE. 
Guitar heros beware, there is a new kid moving into town. 
