To Be, or not To Be.
Shakespeare penned this over a century ago and yet it holds true to everything we do, copy, instigate or imitate as a church. Are we to be like everyone else? Are we to be on the cutting edge? Are we to desire to be better? Are we to be?
IMAG is short for Image Magnification or making things larger on a projection screen so you can see what’s going on far away like in a football stadium for a game or a concert.
This summer has started off CRAZY, and by crazy I mean crazy awesome. I have been stretched in ways I didn’t think possible, but this is a good thing. Since joining the children’s team I have gotten the pleasure of being creative visionary for VBS this year.
We have a Youth Leadership Conference / Missions experience going on right now here in Houston, Texas and my instructions were to create a cool stage.
Man…I wish constraints were always so fast and loose!
I’ve gotten one major project out of the way, and that is the Creek Kids ministry expo. Our theme this summer is a beach theme. So in previous posts you saw the Tshirt with the surfboards, and the ministry fair…well we decided to go beach party in an awesome kind of way. I built 8ft table tops out of fencing panels to look like a beach board walk and set up an island in the center complete with sand and sand sculpture of the creek kids logo. There is a video, I’ll throw the final up on my vimeo page. Continue reading
I am so bored at this event that I have to do something.
So you get a blog post, a bit premature on my new stage design.
This stage design was inspired by the talented Mr. Widney
I’ve used screen door mesh before and loved the look and feel of it, so when I saw Jason’s use of it I knew it was time to break it back out (yes i saved it).
I’ll talk a little bit about the process, but There is a description of the process on flickr! Continue reading
My boss Rick and I went up to Dallas for a Church Tech Directors Round Table meet up.
It was a cool time to get together with a small group of Tech Directors, share passions, frustrations and the like and just be able to lean on each other. It really is a support group because working in a church is like a drug. It’s absolutely thrilling and addictive but it can tear you down too. It’s always good to hear other people are going through what you are currently dealing with, or have dealt with it in past whether tech wise, personality wise or life wise.
On top of the meet up Rick and I took the opportunity to go visit several churches in the area and lets just say…if it wasn’t for the highways I’d want to live in Dallas! There are some stellar churches up there. Lake Pointe Church with Jason Cole as their tech director has it going on. Several campus, a rockin system and solid teaching. We snuck in to Fellowship Dallas and had a look at their hall ways the building was locked up (yes we found an open door due to maintenance and snuck in) so we didn’t get any real cool sneak peaks but were impressed none the less. We got into Irving Bible church and loved the warm open atmosphere of their building. There were actually people WORKING and HANGING OUT in the lobby. Very cool atmosphere with lots of art everywhere. Again the auditorium was locked up tight, but awesome to look at the energy the place had and even talk to a member about how much he loves his church.
Last on the list was Gateway Church and lets just say, wow. I know that they’ve got some stellar worship with Kari Jobe who by the way we ran into at Starbucks while hanging out with Fellowship One’s Anthony Coppage. What I did not know about Gateway was just how much tech they’ve got going on, and how well put together it is. Their new Southlake campus has only been open a few months, and it still smells brand new. Not only does it smell brand new but it oozes professionalism, and tech goodness. It’s easily my favorite place I’ve visited and pretty sure it would rock your face off.
While visiting these places was seriously killer and made me drool over all of the tech goodness I walked away with some thoughts about processes for my teams, and the churches teams as we start looking into potentially starting a new campus and just try to streamline and bolster our tech process as well.
So thanks for the tours and talks my fellow techs.
Much learned and much appreciated.
Oh and if you’re missing a piece of gear just ignore it and know it is being put to good use.
Yes I’m gonna buy one.
No I didn’t buy an original because I was waiting to see what kind of productivity it might offer up to a person in technical production.
For most people it’s a frivolous device. Something that you use to surf the internet, or check your email or watch a movie on the plane. Those things are good things, but not critical things for most day to day life.
I’m on the move alot, from building to building, meeting to meeting. I have to show work or concepts to people. I jump from floor to floor (sound booth in a balcony to the auditorium floor) constantly and want something light weight that I do a number of things with: control presentations, control audio equipment, control lighting surfaces, watch service times and service orders, vnc into machines etc.
It will be nice to have something a little larger than the iphone when taking or viewing notes, reading longer emails or proofing media. I also need to read more. I think normally i just don’t think to pick up a hard copy of a book any more. This will help me to pick stuff up and it will be cheaper, that way if i don’t like it I do not feel as bad and…I didn’t waste a tree.
I can see the ipad as a more functional way to use face time as well.
I will be able to actually see the person I’m talking to rather than squinting at them. (at least in my mind that is how I see it, I have yet to use this technology)
It will be a nice go between as well from a desktop machine, to productivity device. Instant boot is stellar, battery life is good. All around I’m just geeked.
I meant to post something about this up a while back!!
Variety is the spice of life, and so is creative interpretation.
Camps come and go, services come and go and we all use some element of the cross within it. For special occasions we use a physical cross, whether nailing sins and confessions on it, or laying things at the foot of it, or simply a striking remembrance that the forgiveness we’ve received had a price.
What doesn’t change that often is the two beams that get put together to look like a cross. So here is a different take on it.
This cross was going more for an urban feel with camp. I had a former student who’s parents had connection with a scrap yard and so after a few phone calls we had some pieces to create a unique element at no cost.
No welding required…but it did require a strong drill. I burned one out and almost didn’t get it complete.
Resources are always available around you, and the more you’re able to involve others the better. This didn’t take a creative genius but it did take some convincing to step out side of the box and NOT use a traditional wood cross.
If you have the liberty and trust to take some projects to the creative extreme, and maybe to the abstract, play around. Use different materials, call around ask volunteers etc. I just found a brother in law of a co-worker who takes down fences, viola! Instant super weathered wood to use for another project in the works.
Don’t be afraid to try something new, or experiment a little!
Alright my iphone ear buds finally gave up the ghost on the left side so I decided to get a new pair the other day. I needed something with a mic in it for those times i need to switch to a call. When you’re in a lift hanging lights its dang handy!
Anyway I’ve heard good things about skull candy so I decided to buy a relatively cheap pair of buds and give them a whirl. I’m an audiophile and have a very critical ear so that is the review that you’re going to get.
First of all I’m pretty sure this is the product I bought and I was not impressed with the packaging. Kind of on the cheap side, but for $30 in an AT&T store I don’t expect all that much so moving on. The actual head phones came with a neat little storage back akin to what new sunglasses come in. Don’t know if I’ll be using them for the buds or wiping forehead grease off my lenses. I did not like the type of plastic used to coat the cable. It is very stiff and the way it’s wrapped in packaging I am pretty sure the end of my headphone cable will always look like a curly pig tail.
The ear buds come with 3 sizes of plastic buds. None of which feel right in my ears. Comfortableness of wearing on a scale of 1-10 10 being I don’t notice them is about a 3. I totally notice them in my ear canal, they place a good amount of pressure in my ears and they kind of hurt if i put them in to far. (yes I’ve worn other in ears, the UM1′s are awesome) The buds do not like to stay in my ears either, I guess they’re not making a stellar seal. Packaging and looks receive a 2
Now on to sound quality.
This is the interesting part because depending on which way you wear the buds you get a totally different sound out of them. I’ll rate this on two levels on both sides. Voice conversations and audio listening. The two ways to wear them are. traditional style and over the ear.
This places the cone in two different directions, the traditional style of wearing them points the cone into the ear canal but I think towards the wall of the ear. The result is a sound that is slightly brittle without a ton of low end. This was not what I was expecting to hear from these buds when i put them in after talking to a few people about them. If there is low end it comes across as a pop rather than a boom or a thump. Ineligibility is decent.
The over the ear places the cone into a down firing position which opens up the way the sound waves reach your ear drum giving it a more booming low end sound. I was surprised how different the sound was coming from the ear buds, but it muddied the sound up significantly and intelligibility dropped (depending on the music style).
Sound quality 1-10 (same scale as before) about a 5, and when you add in wear-ability it drops it back to a 3.5.
For phone calls I’ve made two now with the head phones in the over the ear configuration. This puts the mic under the chin but I have not received any complaints that you cant understand what I’m saying. There is not much audio feed back into my ear which I like (I hate hearing myself talk). Again depending on who the person is you’re talking to, female the voice is bright enough that it sounds great, a male voice is a little muddy. For Calls I give these about a 6 and wear-ability takes them down to a 4.
Over all these headphones receive a solid 3. They’re utilitarian at best and not for the audiophile or person with sensitive ears.
The new series we started this week at LYF is called My Messed Up Family and to be honest a lot of what I’m leaning towards design wise for the stage has been more general purpose than series stylized. I enjoy those heavily stylized pieces but it’s kind of odd when your stage is branded for something and you’ve got another event going on in your auditorium!
I’ve always been intrigued by the concept of using the stage as your canvas for abstract art. I’ve seen stage designers like Jason Widney do art pieces with some abstract meaning that just look plain awesome. So it was my desire to bring some art and beauty to the stage with this feature while keeping a little bit of abstract meaning. I tossed around a few ideas pre-Christmas to build some light columns out of some coroplast and 1x2s and was met with a little bit of resistance because it didn’t fit the theme as well. So back to the drawing board of my mind and I began to build upon the idea of using basic geometric shapes to build a complex thought on stage. We were talking about the foundations of family, the basic building blocks if you will. So the idea took off to build intertwined cubes.
Still using similar material to what I was going to build the columns out of I started figuring out scale etc. The 1×2′s come in 8ft lengths so I figured that cutting them in half and creating 4 foot cubes would be plenty epic enough to fill the stage. Now how many to actually build? they’re big! I settled on thirty which seemed like a daunting number but realistically once they were all hung interconnected was just about how many i needed. Now how to construct them. As you look through the photo set on flickr you’ll notice the first sides of the squares are interlocked. I used a half inch straight router bit and routed each piece of those with a notch so that the pieces set inside each other. This helped add strength since they are so large. I placed some wood glue and then used a nail gun with finishing nails to hold them together. After the glue set they were solid. The side pieces were the iffy ones. the router bit I bought did not fit my router so instead of routing out an inch and a half notch and applying the support on the sides 
I had to do a half inch notch in the top which was not quite as stable as I’d hoped but with wood glue and nails I achieved enough stability that they could be hung. I left one rung out of each cube so that I could interlock them all together then used the nail gun to finish them off.
Tie line worked great to hang the majority of them. I used safety cable to hang the first few to give a stronger base.
The hardest part after getting the first row hung was figuring out whether to go symmetrical or not. I chose not symmetrical and after that it all started falling together rather quickly.
This project took about two days from start to finish and material cost was around $200 as long as you have the router, chop saw etc.
