May 01 2012
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Creative, Design, Leadership, Tech

Death of the Industry

This is Press, Pause, Play blog round two, looking a little more about the A/V and Tech industry in specific.

The digital age has over saturated the amount of professionals at varying levels in the work place. Competition is fierce, one person can charge $5 for his services and turn out an amazing mass of widgets for $5. These widgets are inherently garbage, but he did them cheap. Another person can turn out $50 widgets of high quality but he can only focus on a few widgets at a time. It’s the old “fast, cheap, good” adage you can only have two.

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Apr 19 2012
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Church, Communications, Creative, Design, Tech, Video

Post-College Advice

Some advice I gave a student about to graduate that is looking to work for a church. Most of these apply to graduates across the board in any creative or media field. (and a shout out for @TheCraigMcLeod he is about to graduate and looking for a position to tie student ministry and video production together so if you’re looking or know someone who is looking let me, or him know!)

and now the blog.

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Apr 17 2012
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Communications, Creative, Design, Leadership, Video

Death of the Craft

craft

[kraft, krahft]
1. an art, trade, or occupation requiring special skill,especially manual skill: the craft    of a mason.
2. skill; dexterity: The silversmith worked with great craft.

“This changes everything. The Industry is dead. There has never been a better time to be an artist” – Seth Godin

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Apr 10 2012
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Nonsense

A time apart

I haven’t blogged since starting my new job at seacoa.st and there is a reason, it’s been a whirl wind of projects!

I can’t really complain about that because it’s my passion to see the church grow in its weekend experience and the projects we have been working on have helped in that area.

Seacoast is a place that I am learning where you work can be a family, and a place to grow and push limits. To say I’m enjoying it is an understatement. Hopefully in the next few weeks I will be able to make some time to post about projects both creative and technical that I have been working on!

I have also started writing a bit over at sundaymag.tv where you can find resources to help grow your Weekend experience!

Right now I’m chilling in Nashville taking some time to recharge. Making some new friends while reconnecting with a few old ones. So until I write again, adieu.

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Jan 06 2012
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Bible, Church

The God who sees me

I ran across this on youversion that I wrote a while back on Genesis 16:13. I dont really journal and then I find things like this that still speak to me.

Just a couple quick things. I love reading and figuring out small pieces of God’s character.

Genesis 16 is all about the conception of Ishmael, Abraham’s son via Sarah’s servant Hagar.

Hagar becomes pregnant and the when she does she lost respect for Sarah. Sarah then tells Hagar to leave.

The first thing I see here (and i had to re-read this passage to even understand this) is that God takes care of his own, and will bring about restoration.

God tells Hagar, yeah you’re pregnant, now what? you don’t have any where to go and the baby needs taken care of…go back to Sarah. I could give you examples out of my own life where i see this taking place either with me or others, and if you thought long enough I’m sure you could too. God brings about the restoration necessary for life to go on…did he fix the problem the way Hagar wanted it to be fixed? probably not, was the proclamation that Ishmael is going to be fighting for his entire life what she wanted for her son? doubtful, yet God worked. God restored Hagar to Sarah, maybe not under ideal circumstances, she was still pregnant you know, and she probably still didn’t see eye to eye with Sarah.

Secondly, the obvious statement is God is the one who sees me, he saw Hagar’s affliction, her pregnancy.

Although obvious it is incredibly powerful.

A little glimpse into the character of God, even when we’re not expecting it, even when we’re hiding, even when we don’t want to be found, God sees us. Then, we see God. We see God for who he truly is, we begin to see his plan, we begin to see that he’s always been there watching over us. Like Hagar we see God as the protector and restorer. It does not say here that God fixes everything just right with a cherry on top and everything is peachy keen, it just says that God saw, and in return she saw God.

That is actually a powerful statement…to see God…
just relish on that for a second.

are you seeing God? am I?
What am I burying myself under, trying to hide myself from God with?

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Jan 05 2012
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Stage, Tech

Winter Stage Set

Ok I need to post the winter stage set up!

I’m not going to write a ton on it here because I’ve written the process of the stage through the descriptions on Flickr. The challenge in this space is that there is not much stage depth and because the screens are over the stage I am very limited on where I can play height into any type of look. The original concept was to create some very large spheres in the vertical space, but that could have messed with more sight lines than the tree does (we did have to add some side TVs to cover our wing positions which had bad sight lines to begin with, this was talked about before the stage was even in design so it just sped up the install). I took the original concept and kept the winter theme but made it work for our space so it wasn’t quite so bulky and hid some of our unsightly stage floor mess. I wanted it to feel like winter, not Christmas so that it could squeeze past the holiday season and get some longevity out of the build.

As always you’re welcome to ask lots of questions! CLICK HERE for the flicker photos.

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Nov 20 2011
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Bible, Church, Communications, Leadership

Why We Do What We Do

A guest post I did over on churchblogideas.com I talked about how everyone leads out in worship in a church congregation, whether it is a worship leader, an usher, a tech person or an attender.

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Nov 16 2011
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Equipment, Stage, Tech

IEM tango

For all of us tech and audio guys out there this is a fun ongoing conversation.

IEM’s vs. Floor Wedges vs. Hearing Loss

Floor wedges were great when In Ears were not available. It was such a touring standard that even when everyone moved to In Ears that wedges are still put out too. So there are multiple noise floors to be overcome by the PA. This is great when a musician decides to pull his ears out, or one dislodges itself, or they want an SLP feel firing at them in addition to filling their ears.

Floor wedges are not good in small venues, it doesn’t matter whether you’re in a church or a tiny club.

IEMs are not a purely church world concept and it protects your hearing. Your’e not pounding your head with 100+ DB of sound for hours on end for days on end. You can control it and leave it nice and quiet and best of all for the mix engineers is you’re left with no noise floor to overcome from all of the wedges.

Why do people pull out an ear. There seems to be one thing no matter what is expressed that seems to cause a person to pull an ear out, room feel. Whether they feel isolated and naked without being able to hear the room, cannot feel response from the crowd or cannot hear any other number of elements they feel the need to pop one.

I get it, I really do…but you’re killing your hearing.

If you notice when you do that one of two things happen, (given a monitor engineer scenario) you ask for more output volume to compensate because you’re trying to overcome room volume. Or you crank your wireless pack up for more volume to compensate for the room. Either way you’re blowing your ear drum out because of how close the source is to your ear and as it becomes fatigued you have to crank it up louder, and louder.

Please put both ears in, encourage musicians to put both ears in, encourage subtractive mixing not additive mixing. If you need more vocals try pulling volume back over all to give you the boost, not adding more vocals to the mix.

Also try minimal mixing. You don’t need a full CD mix in your ears, only what will get the job done. Start out with a rhythm instrument or click and a pitch reference and then build from there.

Don’t take it from me…go talk to a hearing specialist!

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Nov 15 2011
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Nonsense

Two-Fifty tuesday

Redeemed.

I heard this tearm a lot in college in reference to media and the more and more I think about it the more I cringe. Christians think that in order for us to be able to utilize something in reference to the gospel we must try and redeem that medium.

What does that even mean?

transitive verb
1 a : to buy back : repurchase
b : to get or win back
2 : to free from what distresses or harms: as
a : to free from captivity by payment of ransom
b : to extricate from or help to overcome somethingdetrimental
c : to release from blame or debt : clear
d : to free from the consequences of sin
So as a Christian, or a church should we be focusing our energies on redeeming benign entity which Christ is only able to redeem anyway? Or should we be focusing our energy on Christ redeeming people and using media and art as it is.
I don’t care if music has an explicitly Christian message. If I look at a piece of art whether a Christian made it or not I can appreciate it’s beauty and attribute it’s ultimate inspiration to God. I don’t need to redeem every piece of medium by making explicitly “Christian” versions of it, or creating Christian industry versions.
Come on Christian Facebook? God Tube? yeah none of those were actually good ideas.
What should our real focus be?
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Nov 13 2011
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Communications, Rants

Church and Twitter

The question this week was posed, how should the church use twitter.

I may not be popular with this statement and you don’t have to agree, but I don’t think it really should. So here are some thoughts on that.

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