Hope News and iPads apps

Production started today on Hope News.  I think for our first one, from the production side, it looked great.  We were fortunate enough to find a great studio that is renting us some space at a very reasonable price, so here is my gratuitous shout out to marketing ministries they are great.

I think one of the funniest parts was the fact that we needed 2 iPads in the gear bag, one for a teleprompter, and one for a digital clap board/slate to jam sync the 2 cameras.  Both of these applications worked GREAT, it was like the iPad was made for this.  Remember people not just a shiny piece of technology also VERY useful professional gear!
The teleprompter app we used was teleprompt+
The clap board app we used movie slate

So for $35 in apps we saved easily a dozen of hours of production and post production.  Needless to say money well spent!  Do you have great apps for production/post production if so what do you use?

Volunteer appreciation

This past Friday was volunteer appreciation night at my church.  We have some incredible volunteers and point of fact we just could not succeed in any way shape or form without them.  So for volunteer appreciation typically we pull our all the stops so that our volunteers know we care about them.

This year that meant making a digital set 6 projectors wide.  I think the fact that we lined the chair rail up all the way across should earn us a medal or something, seriously it was a nightmare.

Now what you can't see in this picture is that through the windows there was rain, lighting flashing, and people walking by.  All of this was to bring the audience in to the drama, which was a murder mystery. 

We are tearing down the 4th wall one pixel at a time.

A culture of communication... or not

Today was an interesting day, everyone had the day off to recover from the volunteer appreciation last Friday.  So with no one in the office it was the perfect time for our IT guy, Bill Morrison, to do some updates of our phone internet servers.  I came in because a day off for me is really just one less day to get work done, which makes taking days off almost not worth it.  Plus I knew Bill could use some help. 

At one point today we got to talking about communication, or the lack there of at our church.  During this conversation Bill made the comment "we just don't have a culture of communication."  I realized that was really the problem, it's not that people don't want to communicate, it's really they don't know how, or to who. Worse was the realization that all the tools in the world wouldn't fix it if it was not a cultural change. 

One of our problems is we have become a big staff very quickly.  People that have been around awhile never had to learn to communicate in a large staff environment, and people coming in later either didn't have the skills or gave up on them because no one else has them. We have the culture of a small church where everyone knows everything, and nothing more really needs to be passed on.  Unfortunately, we have a large staff (over 100) and most people don't know all the people on staff much less what all their jobs are.  More importantly most people don't know what ripples are caused by the decisions they make.  This is the real danger in a culture non-communication, people will do things that will make more work for other people without realizing it.  This gets back to the church being a submarine.  I know we are not the only ones who suffer from poor communication, or a culture of not communicating what tools/ solutions do you use to overcome this?

On Com tonight

So typically the last 3 minutes of our service countdowns are the highlights of my week.  My crew tends to get a little punchy right before we go live.  This is part of what inspired my blog title, the stuff that gets said... and heard on com during the countdown.  Tonight was no exception, in fact it was probably worse due to the fact the rapture what suppose to happen when the countdown ended.  Everyone had more fodder for jokes than should be legal in this state.  One of the funnier one liners was "due to technical difficulties the rapture has been postponed"

I kept threatening to put a sign the the tech window saying "In the event of rapture the video room will be unoccupied.   Please turn out the light and lock the door on your way out."

After the countdown the worship leader did 2 minute of schtick about it, which was funny because he was grinning like a kid in a candy store by the end of the countdown.  We all knew he had LOTS of material, plus he is great at ad libbing.  I think he could have done 10 more minutes without breaking a sweat.

Which was great but better was right into the first song my presentation person went up on a cue and had to find her way back in the lyrics.  As soon as the wrong one went up, my TD was on the com, the conversation went like this:

Bob: Mark.... Do we have a problem?
>>>remember I am in the middle of directing cameras at this point...
Me: Looking into it Bob hold a sec....
::Pause::
Me: Crap! She's been raptured! Someone get on that computer!

At this point most of my crew LOST it! 
Truly times like this make my job TOTALLY worth it!

Bad inheritance

Any techies who have worked at more then one place, can tell you what they inherit from their predecessor sometimes confuses the heck out of them. This really came home to me this week during a conversation with Mike Sessler who, for the record, REALLY knows his stuff. He was relating an experience he had inheriting gear that was similar to my own. In my own experience we have some gear that I inherited that I REALLY hate.  One of the differences in the story was I do understand WHY it was chosen and THAT makes a world of difference.  While I would not have picked it given the chance I have a hard time arguing the logic behind the initial choice.  The other thing to note is that gear was picked out 6 years ago. In tech years that not decades old, it is almost centuries old.  Technology has changed so much in the past 6 years that challenges we had 6 years ago have simple solutions now.  What it boils down to is the culmination of time and bad planning had taken their toll.

On the upside Mike has a plan, it isn't a quick fix, but he has made some decisions and is working toward those goals. I wish I could say the same, but honesty what I have inherited works, and until it doesn't we will most likely continue to use it. This story is not unique and that is the scary part.

The buzz word for fixing this is "future proofing".  Using myself as an example again, one of the things our gear did well was furture proof us for the SD to HD transition.   Thus allowing us to make the swap from SD to HD piece by piece over the course of 2-3 year and in that time continue to utilize ALL of our older SD and new HD assets at the same time. I can now look at it from our current position and say NOW that we have transitioned over to all HD assets, this gear is now no longer and asset, it is actually a detriment. That said if someone were to inherit this from me tomorrow they would come in an think I was crazy for picking this gear.

Inferior

This post is really just for me, but I will let you guys listen in.... though after this I may have to find away to express my thoughts in a less public manner :-)

Mike (our senior pastor)  has said many times he would hire someone with the fruits of the spirit over someone who is talented.  One of the reasons for that is the church already has tons of talent.... and we have it in spades.  You know who is not talented (big secret here) me. In Mike's message this weekend he said he had an inferiority complex ... which turns out isn't complex, in fact, it's pretty easy.  He is inferior.  At which point I let out a breath I have been holding for 4 years, because I found out I wasn't the only one. 

My motto since I have been working at at the church is "In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king." It's easy for me to be the authority on video in a building where know one else knows anything about it. I see videos from churches all the time that I just sit back and go "WOW I am not sure I could ever do that." And of one of those is YOUR church, AWESOME WORK!  (that is Christian growth in my life right there folks) Which pretty much makes me want to sit in a corner, suck my thumb and then come in a quit my job cause I know I am not good enough at it. Now no one has ever said that to me, not once. I have always managed to get whatever impossible task, finished on time. My end of year review last year summed it up perfectly.  It was hand written in sharpie on a blank sheet of printer paper "you don't suck."  I made the senior pastor sign it, but PR refused to put it in my personnel folder. I know for a fact my effort isn't sub-par, just my ability.  If it were effort alone.... man I think we would have the coolest videos around, but alas it's not.  As my review stated I don't suck... I am just inferior.

So far this really isn't a big deal... so here is the kicker, I am not ok with that.  I'm just not. Call it human nature or chalk it up to me being a flawed vessel, call me selfish, but I am not ok with being just good enough. Why? Easy, it's MY passion, and I want to be the best at it.  So what do I do?  I try harder and I come up short, but only by my standards. Which are the only metrics I trust since as I stated before, no one else knows any better.

Well I am getting better at accepting my inferiority, embracing it really.  Apparently my complex was more complex then I thought.  I am also getting better at recognizing that just cause someone does this better then me it doesn't really diminish me or my accomplishments (though I still need work there).  Another aspect of the solution was to hire a new video producer, (for the post production stuff) who is better at this stuff then me.  This way I can focus on the stuff I am good at (live production), but I can help with the post production stuff I enjoy, and hopefully I can learn a bunch of new stuff and get better at it.  Hopefully that and some long conversations between me and God, will get me comfortable with my inferiority.