Creative Worship

Wow it's been way to long...

In the mean time follow me on HERE.

I will fire this bad boy up again starting tomorrow.

Last Night...

Early morning post.  Just dropped Carlos and his wife off at the airport.  He came and worshiped with us  last night at the Closer To The Start DVD recording.  Thanks for coming out Carlos and Heather!

Last night blew my mind.  The Church amazes me every time.  I wished you could have heard how loud the audience was as they worshiped Jesus.  We put God's work in our lives and in the world on display light night!  From top to bottom last night was the greatest energy filled night I have ever experienced in the 10 years I have been here at Fellowship Church.  Ed spoke about the call of the Church and the vision God has given our church.  God's presence was STRONG.

I have so much more to say about last night and so much more to show you.  Pics and videos to come today, so check back!  I gotta get some coffee.

Coffee with Ed

This is a message we shot with Ed for a weekend experience.  We saw many come to Christ through this crystal clear message of salvation.  It's a little long for a blog, but a great outreach tool.  Pass it around.

Delicious - Coffee and Conversation from Fellowship Church on Vimeo.

Could It Really Be That Easy?

Last night my wife and I completely disassembled our boys' room to get ready to have new carpet installed.  As with most little fellas, getting them to want to go to sleep every night is a challenge.  Not so this night.  We put their mattresses on the floor, and just that simple act changed the whole "good night game" for them.

What small change in your Weekend Worship Experiences, or for that matter your personal walk with Jesus, can you change that would totally flip the script?

Send Love

Here is some content we created in a pinch for one of the songs off "Closer To The Start." I hate to put this out there, because we are totally redoing it for our DVD Recording on November 5th (MARK YOUR CALENDARS AND COME JOIN US). We used this as center screen content behind our band and mixed in IMAG on our side screens. Several have asked for it, so just call me the candy man. You can get a free download of this song here.

New Creation

In October we are releasing our first all original ALBUM .  Last weekend we did one of the songs and supported it with some video and art.  Enjoy.  The song is called, "New Creation."

Creative Week: Thursday

Creative Week: Wednesday

Creative Week: Tuesday

Creative Production Part 1

This past Christmas we opened the service off with a production-heavy eye-catching event. We performed a melody rendition adopted from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra mixed with “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” We synced-up everything from the additional band tracks, to the video screens, to the versatube-driven lighting. The sync was all time-code driven from an HDCAM deck. It started with a mood-setting drone that burst with energy over and over again all the way to the climax at the ending. Below is a clip from the service clean-cut.

Post Production Process:

One of the main energy-driving elements was the video created as the song’s foundation. The design was inspired by the much seen Mary J. Blige iPod spot from Apple. For those involved in video and post production, this post will be enjoyed!

The project started with shooting HD green screen elements on a Sony F-900 of just two actors. The actors played all of the different instruments to our edit and click of the track. Once on tape, we laid out the edit in the timeline and segmented 33 or so scenes to be composited. During the edit stage we determined how many layers of our characters were going to be present in each scene. This simplified the compositing process by presenting a rough-visual picture along with a text animatic track with animation notes.

The fun begins! With the help of Video Copilot, our motion graphics team put together many matte (white on black ) elements from scratch using Adobe Illustrator and After Effects. We have an in-house library of many pre-made mattes, textures and animations that helped speed up the process. We are always adding to our library to assist us with projects each week. In After Effects the animations were parented with the waveform of the music track to be emphasized through the musical beats.

Using the new release of Autodesk Smoke 2009, the compositing began. Smoke 2009 offers a batch schematic workflow that significantly sped up the process. We used the particle system of Autodesk Flame to work in a true 3d environment. The characters were then keyed, color-corrected, duplicated and placed in 3d space.

Each scene was created to increase in complexity as the song climaxed. By the end, the camera moves are drastic, the elements are numerous and the characters appear like a large symphony.

Some ‘gap effects’ and 'axis'-transitions in the Smoke timeline provided the flashing and blurring that created additional harmony between the video elements and music.

This project was one of our team’s favorites. Surprisingly, we were able to complete it in about 4 days time...Wow. Thank the Lord for the ability to lean on Him to provide creativity and productivity in such a tight time-span.

Update: You can view the Element by itself here.