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.)
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.
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.
A good question isn’t it? Hmmm, strangely enough, my email box has NOT filled up with anxious pleas for my whereabouts, safety and much less… another post. Regardless, here I am, again.
Where have I been? Its been a looooong 6 weeks or so since my last post. I have a three part answer to the question you didn’t ask.
Reason 1 I have been here at SSCC’s new building. I was coordinating audio, video and lighting guys most of December and into January. Long hours there led to late night laptop work and just down right exhaustion. Follow that up with a week of moving our offices and a weekend more of audio/video systems guys in town and you get… well, you get nothing as far as you are concerned. Nothing, and you will like it.
Reason 2 I always said that if I didn’t have anything nice to say, I wouldn’t say it. Hmmm, wait, that isn’t quite it. Unfortunately I will sometimes say not-so-nice things. What I DID say was that I never wanted to blog for the sake of blogging or even worse, for the sake of driving traffic. So, that reason, in the midst of reasons 1 & 3, played largely into my silence. I just didn’t feel like I had anything that anyone else wanted to hear.
Reason 3 My daughter was born! Gracie is here!
I just love this picture of her yawning that I took earlier tonight. I think she is bored of my blog or something. Anyway… we welcomed her to the world Monday, January 14th, at 7:49 pm. She was 6lbs, 12.8oz and 19 inches long. (Shouldn’t it be tall? I think she is only a few inches “long” really.) All are healthy on the mom-daughter end. And we are adjusting to that whole “being responsible for another human life” thing.
So that is where I have been. Thanks for asking and I will see you soon!
Here is a video testimony we played in our three services this morning. It is the first video I have shot since we got in our Britek lighting kit. We got a 3 point florescent kit with boom stands, an umbrella and two light boxes. Anyway, it was a learn as we go thing. Chris, my Associate Tech Director, and I set the lights up about an hour before Kevin, the guy in the video, and Deb, our Producer got there. We basically took turns sitting in the light and looking into the camera until we got something we liked. I have a lot of experience using make-shift light rigs with work lamps. I also have experience dealing with 100% “house light.” Chris is a still photography nut, and has used some photo lighting a good bit. With our powers combined… Captain Planet! Ok, sorry, I am a child of the 80’s and can’t say “with our powers combined” without thinking of earth, wind, heart, fire, and water, along with the poster boy for Greenpeace himself, Captain Planet. Who is with me there? Anyone…?
OK, apologies for that rabbit trail, welcome to the inside of my head. Anyway, with mine and Chris’s EXPERIENCE combined I think we pulled off something pretty nice for some “professional video lighting” rookies. As for the rest of the shoot…. We used our two Panasonic DVX-100 cameras and a Sennheiser wireless mic on Kevin. We used a Rode NTG-2 shotgun mic for the second camera but it was only used to sync footage. Pretty standard two camera shoot. One camera basically locked on a tripod straight ahead while I roamed with the other. You’d be surprised at how many cool shots I ruined with my shaky hands.
Here is the video, let me know what you think, heck, let me know what I can do better next time. I promise not to delete your comments unless you make it personal. HaHa.
Oh, and props to Explosions In the Sky, a rockin band that I used to back this testimony in church. The song is called “What Do You Go Home To?”
