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.
