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.
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.
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?
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.
In October we are releasing our first all originalALBUM. Last weekend we did one of the songs and supported it with some video and art. Enjoy. The song is called, "New Creation."
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. BligeiPod 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.
What a crazy day! I just landed in Pittsburgh, PA with my family of five. Let me just say that kids are not designed for long airplane trips and I am definitely not designed for long airplane trips with three kids. THANK YOU JESUS FOR MY WIFE! Anyway, I am homeless and sort of out-of-pocket for the next couple of weeks. We are staying at my in-laws house until our house is ready.
I plan to rest while I am here. We have been on a long run since Fall of '07. I need this break some kind of bad. I look forward to getting refreshed. While I am here I am going fishing for walleye and smallmouth bass and hunting for turkey with my brother-in-law. I hope to post pictures soon.
I also plan on wrapping up a 4 week study on worship I am writing with our Worship Leaders. In May we will be taking our entire Worship/Media team through this study. I have wanted for some time now to have a curriculum of sorts to have all our volunteers, band members, choir members, and worship team members to go through so we can all have the same vision. I can't wait for what this is going to do for our team!
But before all of that I am just going to hang with the family, the fish, and the turkeys.
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