A guy I know tweeted something the today that has kinda been sticking with me. I met Anthony Coppege a few years back at WFX, years later I presented with him at the same conference. I would pretty much just go to a conference to hear him because he has such an awesome heart for God, a wealth of knowledge and experience and is just an all around awesome guy. One of the things I always love about listening to Anthony is one the same things I about Mike Lee. There are times he says things that I am pretty sure were just for me.
So when he tweets something like "I think today's church tech arts is in greater need of leaders than skilled technicians. The focus must shift from the gear to the people." That gets my attention.
He qualified it later with "In my opinion...because church leaders have been satisfied with tech = support instead of tech = ministry."
Ouch
I would really love to say he is wrong here, but I can't tell you how often I hear about tech guys getting burned out of have bad experiences. I have seen lots of TD's quit their jobs and lots of churches posting open TD positions and it really saddens me. I think a big part of it is because the people they work for see them as providing a service not as working in a ministry. Yes, I absolutely think Church leaders need to treat their tech team the way they treat other ministries. They need to be casting vision to, praying with, worshiping with, doing Church with their tech teams. I think that would be a great start halting the steady decline I see in tech ministry as a whole.
But, where this gets me is if we want to be treated like a ministry we need to act like a ministry. I wish I could remember who it was I read this from, but somebody once said a good TD is 1/3 tech geek 1/3 cheerleader, and 1/3 pastor. Two of those I am really good at, that last one, not so much. I am not going to make excuses about it, I am just flat out not good at that side of it.
So I am going to place this challenge to TD's (myself included) work harder at the ministering side of the job, focus on the people.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Clear Com review
A did this review a while back for church production on the clear-com tempest.
You can read the review here
You can read the review here
Thursday, June 23, 2011
K.I.S.S/triple wide = 2 and 1
I know this is a little late, but I just came across this this picture tonight. This was our stage during our Memorial Day tribute. Now anyone who has ever browsed Digital Juice will immediately recognize these old school jump backs. This look was SUPER easy to make and at the same time it is probably one of the more effective graphics I have made lately. I really love the projection-on-projection look, and it is really easy to accomplish. It's really just a funny layout of a triple wide projection, a double and a single instead of triple. Before I dive into the tech side of how this was done, the point I wanted to make here was this, sometimes simple is best. As in the title K.I.S.S (keep it simple stupid) As I said this was easy and it is probably one of my more powerful pieces.
For the tech geeks I will drive this a little further into details. We are doing this look with 3 projectors, ProPresenter, and a triplehead2go
The center screen and some of the truss are masked out in ProPresenter as well as the large gap under the screen. I don't know that there is an easy way in ProPresenter to advance
through masks (feature request/firmware update right there) so it was
difficult to change the mask just for the Memorial Day look.
(WARNING TANGENT AHEAD)
The reason that gap is there is because we hit that space with tons of light during the message to make the pastor pop off the background at out multi-site. As seen here.
We use lighting in the gap because the projected image alone in that same space is not bright enough, so in the cameras it looks washed out. Also the speaker blends right into it ... so we use lighting at that gets us this result.
Now that red/yellowlight effect is coming from LED cyc light hitting it from the top and the bottom. We would have done just that to create the rock like look/texture, but it was easy to add the blue to tie it to the graphic above the pastor's head.
(WE NOW RETURN YOU TO OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED BLOG)
The cyc projection
is stretched across projectors 1 & 2, along with the mask, the
center screen is off of projector 3. This way I only need to change the
right most 3rd to put something totally
different on the center screen.
Projectors 1 and 2 are not edge-blended, they are edge butted. Since our edge blending is all done in ProPresenter, we couldn't blend them without messing up the edge of projector 3, because it would have tried to blend the left edge of that image as well. Plus the seam is really not very noticeable because the majority of it is covered by the center screen.
The texture on the flag is coming from (I kid you not) mosquito screening. We zip-tied dozens of 48"x 25' rolls along the long sides and crumpled them up and hung them over our white cyc.
Point of fact this was done for the series as a whole not just for this look. The series art was rock, as you can see in the tangent portion of the blog. The rock texture projected on crumpled mosquito screening looks really good. It also looks great with just lighting, but we don't have enough cyc lights to cover our entire cyc.
We use noramly use one piece of triple wide content to drive all the projectors, on occasions like this I can change it up to a double wide and a single, by just changing the way the graphics are laid out in the design. Since the congregation is really desensitized to the content on the center matching the content on the cyc by purposefully mixing it up it really denotes something is different. Again this makes it real easy to be flexible and gives you another way
to make some changes that really mark important times in the service, in
a subtle yet powerful way.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
TDs/Fathers/Husbands
At dinner this evening I saw an incident that just broke my heart, a
young couple and their toddlers were sitting across from us. Mom was
struggling with the kids, both of them, dad was there but not involved. After much struggling the incident finally culminated in the
mom saying "This is hard work, why don't you help me?" clearly referring to more then just here in the restaurant, followed by "I don't know why I became a mother!" in front of her kids. I have become far more sensitive to things like that since my kids were born, but I almost broke down right there. Luckily I think her kids were young enough they may have missed it entirely.
Most of the TD's I know are family men, so I want to speak to you guys for a second. As a father/husband/TD I know how tough it is to balance family and work. I would be lying if I said I always keep that balance in the right order. I don't, I do try and I even sometimes succeed. I know don't even make the ballot for father/husband of the year, I am far from perfect and while my family is great I am totally flawed. All of that to say I hope I NEVER give my wife cause to even think that phrase, much less say it.
So if the title applies to you make it a point TODAY to let your family know how much you care.
Most of the TD's I know are family men, so I want to speak to you guys for a second. As a father/husband/TD I know how tough it is to balance family and work. I would be lying if I said I always keep that balance in the right order. I don't, I do try and I even sometimes succeed. I know don't even make the ballot for father/husband of the year, I am far from perfect and while my family is great I am totally flawed. All of that to say I hope I NEVER give my wife cause to even think that phrase, much less say it.
So if the title applies to you make it a point TODAY to let your family know how much you care.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Relevant struggles
After doing the podcast earlier this week Duke DeJong said something that has kinda been sticking with me. He said sometimes he struggles with IMAG. I couldn't agree more, I struggle with it as well.... and just to be clear IMAG is my job. The good news in our building is that 1500 seats pretty much requires it, so it's gunna get done one way or another. However, in an effort to do these things it's real easy to loose sight of the goal, eliminate distractions.
It's very easy to say IMAG creates distractions, I think my team does an awesome job, but it's a live environment and that means mistakes WILL HAPPEN. When they do they WILL be distracting.
That said I choose to push hard to make our IMAG good, or atleast as good as I can make it. Does is sometimes cause a distraction? YES sometimes is does. That said I like to think that the way we do IMAG is an accurate portrayal of our churches culture. We do IMAG the way we do because it fits our worship. If you have never seen IMAG in a church before, ours would probably qualify VERY distracting. Why would I do that? I think Jim Rayburn the founder of younglife said it best "It's a sin to bore a kid with the Gospel." I think that goes for adults as well. I think is is a sin to bore anyone with church. While the way we do things may be a little distracting, I can pretty much promise you, you will not be bored.
But where do you draw the line between distraction and enhancement? How does you view change when you look at it like this: "every single thing you add tech wise can fail and cause a distraction"? That cost always has to be weighed against "what is it eliminating/how is it helping us accomplish our vision." I think TD's should push to keep from being boring but always temper that drive with a passion for eliminating distractions, this will probably cause some internal struggle. However if you aren't thinking that way, if you aren't struggling with creating distractions versus eliminating them then you probably aren't doing your job very well.
I don't think you have to have the answer about where the line is because I would say in most cases it's a moving target. I think finding "the line" is less important then knowing there is one, and trying to keep to this side of it.
It's very easy to say IMAG creates distractions, I think my team does an awesome job, but it's a live environment and that means mistakes WILL HAPPEN. When they do they WILL be distracting.
That said I choose to push hard to make our IMAG good, or atleast as good as I can make it. Does is sometimes cause a distraction? YES sometimes is does. That said I like to think that the way we do IMAG is an accurate portrayal of our churches culture. We do IMAG the way we do because it fits our worship. If you have never seen IMAG in a church before, ours would probably qualify VERY distracting. Why would I do that? I think Jim Rayburn the founder of younglife said it best "It's a sin to bore a kid with the Gospel." I think that goes for adults as well. I think is is a sin to bore anyone with church. While the way we do things may be a little distracting, I can pretty much promise you, you will not be bored.
But where do you draw the line between distraction and enhancement? How does you view change when you look at it like this: "every single thing you add tech wise can fail and cause a distraction"? That cost always has to be weighed against "what is it eliminating/how is it helping us accomplish our vision." I think TD's should push to keep from being boring but always temper that drive with a passion for eliminating distractions, this will probably cause some internal struggle. However if you aren't thinking that way, if you aren't struggling with creating distractions versus eliminating them then you probably aren't doing your job very well.
I don't think you have to have the answer about where the line is because I would say in most cases it's a moving target. I think finding "the line" is less important then knowing there is one, and trying to keep to this side of it.
Monday, June 6, 2011
Church Tech Arts
Last night I got do something entirely new for me. I was part of a podcast recording for church tech arts weekly. All in all it was way more fun then one person should be allowed to have. Basically I got to shoot the tech breeze for 2 hours with some of the big guns in the business:
You can find it here
These guys put tons of effort in to all that they do and on top of that, they do something I really admire, they go above that to help and encourage other TD's all over.
It's encouraging for me to know these guy are not perfect, they don't have all the best toys, and they are living/dealing with decisions/sacrifices and less then perfect tech scenarios. In other words they are in the same boat as every other TD out there, but despite all that they all keep a great attitude about it. I hope if I keep hanging out with these guys some of that will rub off on me :-)
Sunday, June 5, 2011
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