About to years ago we did this video for a sermon opener. We were in a series studying David. This video is making a point about being overly concerned with the outward appearance. Our youth pastor, Jon Blankenship, is in this video as “JBlank.” Unfortunately for Jon, JBlank is a recurring character he plays that seems to always manage to make a fool of himself in each video. Somehow this video came up in the office today and I showed it to Fred, our worship director, who hadn’t seen it before. He insisted that I get it online so we could share it with the world. Make sure you hang on til the end to see Jon on the treadmill. Yes, he really fell. We were planning a fall and I had Bo running the camera while Jon was figuring out what he was going to do to fall. In the process, well, he fell. We staged a fall a couple more times but once he fell for real he couldn’t commit to a fake one and they weren’t nearly as good. I guess getting flung into the wall head first makes you gunshy. Oh, and sorry about the low image quality, I ripped it from a DVD and then had to re-encode it to upload it and that degraded it pretty noticeably.

Enjoy!

-Travis

I know some folks have had trouble playing embedded videos here, so if thats the case, here is the link to the file.

I don’t know a ton about this guy, but watch his commercial and tell me you don’t want to vote for him.

What do ya think?-Travis

This is a soap box that I hop on every so often. I am not sure what sparks the passion when it happens, but regardless, I get frustrated and vent.

I am not even sure what first made me start thinking about this today, I guess it was “Christian Musician” magazine at Barnes & Noble, or something like that. I just remember it had Casting Crowns on the cover and was crowded in with the rest of the music magazines I had intended on thumbing through. Anyway, what is it with ‘Christian Alternatives’ anyway? I regularly find myself incredibly bothered by them. Godtube and Shoutlife are big names in the Christian rip off category. Yeah, I called it a rip off, it is what it is. HaHa. It seems like every time there is a vehicle for easily spreading light in the darkness, someone does something to pull the light OUT of the darkness. And, in my not-so-expert opinion, it is usually a poor variation of the original.

YouTube and MySpace are really amazing technological developments. These two things draw astonishing amounts of people to their respective pages and allow them to spend way to many hours there. There is unlimited potential for viewership and influence on the personal pages and posts of these two communities. Obviously, they got huge, they got a lot of press and they got a lot of content (of all moral standards) uploaded to them. So what is the Church’s response? “Let’s make our own!” I understand the reason, I think. ShoutLife, for instance, allows a MySpace type community without the questionable ads on the pages. Godtube provides the same searchable video library as YouTube with the addition of content screening and control.

The way I see it, they are saying, “hey, all you good intentioned users out there, lets do this somewhere else.” Consequentially, removing light from the midst of apparent darkness. I tend to LIKE the idea of a funny Christian video getting bounced around YouTubers. I think it is great when someone who faithfully follows Christ talks about it in the middle of MySpace or Facebook and I HOPE they are connected to hundreds of friends that will see it too. Shoutlife can provide a ’safer’ environment for teens to roam on the internet but I am not sure what would prevent sickos from going there too. Godtube’s mission is to ultimately advance the Gospel, but I don’t see how well it will work. I don’t think entitling something “God…” will attract the average unbeliever to its pages. Yes, I recognize that seekers will go there and all that, but I’m considering the norm, not the exceptions.

I just wonder if all these Christian alternatives aren’t counter productive to the advance of the Gospel? A Google search of “Christian Web Alternatives” will reveal a myriad of these things. I just learned that there is even a Christian alternative to the Girl Scouts, wow.

Are we piling up our salt and putting our lit candles under a bowl? What do you think?

I am the first to knock “What Would Jesus…” about anything. But I was perusing The Onion this morning and I found this movie trailer which I thought was a joke. But its apparently not. The same guy that did Super Size Me has done this documentary on American consumerism, Christmas spending and debt. I cannot vouch for its theology, for its ’safeness to watch.’ or for its content. All I have seen is this trailer and a few reviews on it that I just found elsewhere in my search to determine if it was real or not. It seems to be in line with Dave Ramsey & Crown Financial as well, but who knows at this point. It does apparently take a shot at the ‘televangelist character’ (and who hasn’t) but I do not think it is anti-Christian in any way.

What do you think?

-Travis

WWJB

If this doesn’t bring technology and theology together, then I don’t know what does. I found this story on CNN. Apparantly, started by a hunch, an Itallian musician has studied the Last Supper long enough to determine there is music written into the art. Of course, you have to read it backwards and connect some “methodically chosen” dots for the notes, but hey, could it be?

Sounds a bit Da Vinci Code-ish, I know, but there is no catch at least. The musician claims it is a piece that would respectfully accompany the emotion of the picture. Read the article and let us know what you think. I’m skeptical myself, but, I’m always septical, so, who cares right?

It seems a bit random that the guy doing this decided where to draw the staff for the notes to rest on and then he decided which pieces of the painting represented notes. Bread, hands and who knows what else were deemed worthy of a note. What about the interesting pieces that didn’t get notes? Sometimes a painting is just a painting. Does everything really contain some sort of subliminal message?

Anyway, what do you think?

-Travis

First of all, is “gotta-have” a word? Is it… anything? Well, it isss NOW!

I spent the better part of today trying to hash out my budget for next year. Is it bad that I like a day in the spreadsheets every once in a while? (On a side note, props to Apple’s new app “Numbers.” Somehow its way more fun than Excel and way easier to use.) I got to see who puts things on my tab at the church while I was at it. Turns out David, our pastor, charged about $250 in 2007 to GENE013 “Computers, Software and Technology.” I am gonna put my Mac Pro in January in “Pastor Books” to retaliate. I can’t wait to see the look on his face when he goes to buy his next Thomas Kinkaid calendar and can’t afford it.

Anyway, moving on to the real reason you are here. One of the things in the budget for next year that I hope to get is this Firestore from Focus Enhancements. This 60GB Hard Disk recorder connects straight to our DVX 100 cameras. We can record 5 or so hours of footage on them and take it straight to Final Cut for editing, no capture time. This stands to save me over an hour per average testimony video and who knows how much for more involved shoots. I hope to get two of these, one for each camera, and hit the ground running.

So, now the big question. What items are you putting in your budget for ‘08 that we need to know about? Come onnnnnnnn, share the love.

-Travis

Here is a video that we did a few months ago. I have had a few friends ask for me to put this on the web so they could see the interfaces we did. The sermon series we were in at the time was called “iReach: Changed Lives.” It was kind of a vision casting/clarification time for our church. It was a four week series, week one was “Changed Lives,” week two was “Reach Up,” week three was “Reach In,” and week four was “Reach Out.” It really was a great series, you can check out the messages and more here at the church media page. We are finally starting to get release permission from folks so we can put this stuff on the web. The testimony about the Home Group being a pillar in the time of need is pretty awesome.

In addition to the message of this video, the production was pretty cool too. This video was filmed and edited almost entirely by two high school students. (One of which is the son of the couple in the video.) I helped them set up the cameras and capture the footage. They did all the editing, audio sweetening and most of the color correction. (I didn’t check the color balance on the second camera, oops. It needed more color correction than time allowed for.)The interface at the beginning was created in house. I made an iTunes knockoff look. I redrew the basic layout and a different color scheme in Adobe Illustrator. We then set the order for the 4 week series and the videos in each service and animated the Illustrator file in Adobe After Effects. This helped to create the illusion of a camera zooming in and out on the iReach interface, showing the previous videos and the next one to be played. To top off the project, our worship director, Fred McKinnon, scored the soundtrack for all of the videos we did in this series.

Well, enough talky.Here is the video. Let me know what you think. We were pretty proud of the whole series look once it was finished. I think it really made people evaluate their own roles in God’s plan. The “i-theme” was used in the print materials and on screen as well. We believe it helped them to personalize things, not to mention it is culturally relevant. If for some reason anyone wants it, I can supply the After Effects CS3 and Illustrator CS3 files that we used if you want to do something similar. Just let me know.

-Travis

Click here to play.

I have had trouble with this video playback some, be sure to harass me about it if it plays in fastforward or anything.

We moved the console for our new building into our current sanctuary for training purposes last week. We will use it here for the next few months so we are comfortable on it when we triple the inputs and double the monitor mixes in our new facility. Today was the first live service I have mixed on the Yamaha M7CL and boy is it nice! At rehearsal Thursday when we first cut it on and Fred sang and played on his keyboard we knew it was going to be a treat. One of our vocalists, who has been with the church praise team for over 7 years, said she had never hear her voice that clear before. We had guys in the crowd who didn’t know anything had even changed asking what we did differently because “it was just so clear today.” If it made that much of a difference on our current setup (3 Peavey mains and 2 BagEnd Dual 12 subs) I can only dream of what it will sound like in the new system (two 8 speaker Meyer M1D line arrays and two Dual 18 700HP subs).

Props to the Yamaha preamps and its easy operation. It sounded great right out of the box. On top of that, it is extremely user friendly, especially considering how powerful the board is. I spent the better part of last week learning the board and then resetting the wiring in our current sanctuary to connect to it. I was very comfortable sitting at the board this morning for our first service even though I had only had it for a week. It just really makes sense how it is run. Contrary to our other board, the incredibly UNintuitive Soundcraft 324 Live. Don’t get me wrong, that board has NEVER let us down and produced a good sound for 5 years now. We just really didn’t realize what we were missing on the console end of things until we switched them out.

One of the nicer features of the board is its offline editing software that is available free on their site. A file of about 70k in size contains all the data for the board. I sat at home last night watching college football and checking my console settings on my laptop. I found a few settings that I had missed and was able to make the changes at home, save them on my USB key and in under a minute, load them into the board this morning.¬† I have also been able to show this software to my awesome volunteers and they are able to ‘play’ with the console at home if they want. I can give them a copy of the setup we use and they can learn their way around it and even make improvements and bring them back to us.

Well, enough on the M7 for now, I am sure you will here more later as we integrate the full system.

Anyone else out there using one?

-Travis

It’s not the first time, and hopefully it won’t be the last, but it is a big deal to me anyway. Two guys from NJ have been convicted and are being sentenced for sending out millions of spam emails, mostly to AOL users. Its a small step to stopping junk mail but a big step to stopping masked messages. Here is more of the story. Hopefully this will start to put a little more fear in the spammers minds. These two guys got busted by taking a ‘project’ from a government informant.

I don’t like getting junk mail more than anyone else. My web hosting services (I have 5 different ones) do a varying level of good against spam. Gmail is good, Apple’s .mac is great (although I don’t have that address out there anyway), 1&1 internet is ok, HPP was awesome and is decent now, they do provide good support and hosting services. And finally there is Comcast who are average with spam filtering. All that being said, what is it worth to me to get it stopped? I am curious to know the amount of government resources that are going to stopping it. It seems like there are bigger fish to fry than spammers. Spammers are a hassle, but isn’t that also what the delete button is for? As long as I am not charged for bandwidth, it is at most a minute or two a day of deleting and no other cost. I do get occasional complaints from some of the women at my office about the content of the junk messages, I wish there was more I could do for them.

So, lets discuss. How big of an issue is junk/spam to you? Do you think we need the govt. resources going to it, and does it make a difference? Do you have any good or bad email services to recommend or warn against?

-Travis

I learned this week that Kevin, they guy in the testimony video I shared earlier this week, brought a friend with him to church this week. After hearing Kevin’s testimony in the video and a great word from our pastor, the Lord moved in his heart and he accepted Christ.¬† I know it must have been super encouraging for Kevin to walk through that with his friend as well.

What an awesome opportunity to be a part of another changed life! It makes the hours put into that video seem like nothing. Not that Christ NEEDED the video, but He used it on multiple levels. Yay for technology! And yay for Kevin and his friend.

-Travis