I wear a lot of hats here at St. Simons Community Church and at the Gathering Place where I volunteer regularly. My job title is Technology Director. My roll is WAY more complicated. I am involved with everything audio, video, lighting, IT, software, graphic design, video production, event production, service planning, content planning, and a few other things I am missing. I like the multitasking, I like the every-day-is-different, I like the freedom & responsibility. (This is where I must mention the two guys I work closely with: Bo and Chris, they share an equal load in tech direction in the church and I/we couldn’t come close to doing it without them.) What I don’t like is how it has fostered a critical nature in me.

I am responsible for what happens in our live services for instance. So whether I am running front of house, producing, or making sure that our awesome volunteers are taken care of, I still find myself generally somewhere in the back of the room or video booth critiquing. It seems that without it being specified in my job description anywhere, I am constantly identifying problems, errors, oversights and just things we could have done better. This is bad for people in my postion or similar ones because we will become generally negative pretty quick. It is the nature of the beast I think. We just have to tame that.

I don’t want to be the guy that only points out the bad things and neither should you. People will quickly discount what we say if all we ever have is a bad thing to say. Even worse probably, it will frustrate us quickly. If all we do is focus on the bad stuff we will stop seeing any good stuff. I had a real gut check this past week when running sound at a youth event in our community. We have had some technically frustrating nights this summer and followed that up with a few nights that SEEMED spiritually frustrating as well. This past week everything went pretty smoothly, which is nice, but the big thing for me was SEEING life change. People responded to a clear message and call from God through our speaker. I stood at the console in the back of the room while two people behind me wept and prayed out loud.

There are about 1000 students a week there and lives have been being changed all summer, I just hadn’t really even attempted to put myself in a place to notice. Actually, lives have been being changed by God long before I offered Him my amazing services. Lives were being changed before you jumped on board at your place too. Here is the kicker, God doesn’t need perfect pitch, flawless transitions, the right SPL and hyped up videos to move. He uses them to move and thankfully allows us to be a part of that. We need to remind ourselves of that fact.

So here is the take home on this, and yes, it will be on the test. Have you heard of a compliment sandwich? You should try one, they are delectable. I must confess that Stewie Griffin set the example for me. Anyway, KEEP CRITIQUING. It is important to always work to honor God by doing the best you can with what He has given you. However, every time you notice a negative, find two positive things about the event, service or whatever to report on as well. Sandwich that criticism between some positive review. Trust me, the people you work closely with will greatly appreciate it and they will PROBABLY start listening to what you have to say too.

So, anyone else feel me? Chime in with your thoughts and experiences.

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.)

Enjoy
-Travis

[quicktime]http://www.travispaulding.com/Uploads/JB_Intro_2_small_h264.mov[/quicktime]

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.

Enjoy! And let me know what you think.

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.

-Travis

I just wanted to share another one of our videos. We are beginning a three week Christmas series this Sunday entitled “Be Still.” It is about, well, being still. You know, “Be still and know that I am God.” We saw a video at Drive Conference two years ago that made an impact on a lot of our staff and so we “adopted” their concept and made our own. The video was edited in After Effects and the graphics were created by my co-worker Chris in Photoshop.

The video will play following a prayer in the service. We will have all the lights out and wait about 8-10 seconds before we play it. That way there will be an awkward silence to get people’s attention and make the first word on the screen more noticeable. There is no audio on this video and there won’t be in the service either. If you get distracted, cut on iTunes and restart it. However, if you can’t make it through in silence, maybe you need to check on the podcasts of this series. HaHa.

Let me know what you think, and enjoy this special sneak preview if you are watching this before Sunday.

Travis

If you can’t get the video to play here, follow me over to YouTube.

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.

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.

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

Hey folks. At the urging of some coworkers I want to share another video done at SSCC. This is a video played in Rush Hour, our Middle School ministry. We use it each week as kids break into their small groups. The theme for the ministry is based around driving and cars, that is why you have a car bouncing in the video. The final copy of the video runs for the length of the song and is at full resolution.

This was done using Illustrator & After Effects. I used Illustrator to recolor and cut the car into separate parts for animation. Once in After Effects I created the headlights and then animated the driver’s side wheels, headlights and car body to move with different frequencies from the soundtrack. The headlights were created using a plugin called Lux and the motion was animated to sync with the music using a plugin called Soundkeys. Both plugins are from Trapcode. The song is “Love Addict” by Family Force 5. The background and waveform in the video were generated in After Effects as well.

Let me know what you think. Also, if you actually like it and want to use it for your ministry drop me a line. My only request would be that you buy a copy of the Family Force 5 CD for yourself so you have the right to play it.

-Travis

Small Group Video

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?”

-Travis

Video Testimony