Easter this year was awesome, we had 11,000+ people come through the doors of our campuses. Our band was fantastic and my team did a great job. So I am going to geek out a little and show you how Easter looked to me. Let me set the stage for what you are about to see, this is 1/2 of my monitor wall, the half dedicated to cameras and our sides screens.  The other 1/2 is dedicated to the center screen and other inputs.  The eight monitors on the left are 5 cameras; 1,2,3,4,and 6.  No there is no cam 5, it and an unfortunate run-in with a bucket lift and has not been replaced. Also you will notice the V-1 side and V-1 center, this is the 2 signals we are recording for the multi-sites, this is just to monitor the signals so I can keep an eye on them.  The V-1 side is the same as program and the V-1 center is just camera 1, which is unmanned, and set up for our speaking pastor, so you will notice I never use it.

There are a few things I want you to notice about the way we do things:

1) I don’t direct much- it’s up to the camera guys to find the action and be in the right place.  I may give them a little heads up if I know something is coming up but it’s really up to them.  Oh yeah, they also ROCK! My camera guys are great, best in the business for sure.  My switcher for this week was on his A game as well, they really fired on all cylinders all around.

2) I made mistakes- there are a couple of shots I wish I hadn’t taken. Also camera 4 got it’s white balance changed in the middle of the set, notice how quickly that gets fixed after I realize it’s an issue. 

3) Notice the way the camera guys vary their shots for slow songs vs. fast songs.

4) Yes I use wide shots for IMAG, Yes I understand I am breaking the rules, No I don’t care.

5) We don’t have tally lights so the camera ops are completely reliant on my voice for whats going on.

Our set for Easter was a little different this year.  Our TD wanted to reuse some lighting design elements that we haven’t used in 3 or 4 years.  This got me excited because we never used them as projection surfaces so I was really looking forward to this project.  One of the challenges we knew up front was the mask for this one was going to be a pain.  It may not have been the worst one have ever done, but it was one of the more difficult, but I am getting ahead of myself. Lets start with the stage.

Looks great right?! The tomb is made out of… well think paper mache but instead of paper use canvas and instead of plaster of Paris use concrete.  It’s paper mache for tech guys, if you will.  It creates a huge mess just for the record.  There are 2×4 and chicken wire framing underneath it.  Above we have spandex panels and crosses made out of truss and covered in muslin.  Crazy enough we had all this already.  Our TD and his team did a great job with this design, it was lot of man hours for the volunteer staff to make this dream a reality, but as usual they did it.

So now was my contribution to the set, the projection mask.  In the grand scheme of things this is about as unimportant as it gets, but they way it’s done is REALLY cool I think, which is part of the reason I do it.  First lets start by looking at the projectors.  Now we are producing this image on 3 projectors, that are not edge-blended but are over-lapped.  Easier to show than tell.

In retrospect, I am aware this is about the worst picture I could have used for the purpose demonstration…thanks for noticing.  So that is what each projector is responsible for, yes I am aware that the crossbeams are on one projector and the rest of the image is from another, that was a big part of the challenges. Since they over-lap, I have to account for that area on both sides of the projection.  One to show it (projectors 1 and 3) and one to cover it (left and right side of projector 2). The problem is nothing accounts for the space, so building the mask it really a shot in the dark and pretty much just a trial and error situation.  I ended up doing this one projector at a time moving right to left shuttering the projectors as needed.

In the end I ended up with the oddest shaped mask:

As you can see the mask only looks a little like my surface.

The last thing I did which was a little different was colored the mask for the crosses.  I started with a bright yellow, just to make it easy to see.  It ended up looking tacky, and white made them pop too much, so I went the other way and made the mask brown. This helped color the muslin on the crosses a little but it didn’t really make them all that much brighter.

All the stage pictures in this post are photo-merges of 3-5 photos pieced together in photoshop.  It’s a really simple process, quick shout-out to Josh Hancock for teaching it to me.

A few months back I had the privilege of doing FOH, projection design, and sound design for a local theater group.  The performance of Agatha Christie’s  “And Then There Were None” surprisingly had lots of sound effects, many of which ran concurrently.  One of the set guys mentioned that in the past they had used Qlab for the sound effects.  So just a few days before dress rehearsal I down load the software HERE had it loaded in up in less then an hour and had enough understanding to program and run the show in about 3 hours.  Let me just say as a video guy this was one of the first times I ever did serious audio work that made sense to me.  The program is laid out similar to a nodal compositor (which I have only ever seen and only vaguely understand)  it has lots of great functionality, and oh yeah it’s FREE.  I think this is a great little piece if software that the church market may have overlooked. 

This was my project file after 3 hours of work, I was really pretty proud of this since again I had never used this software before. While I know the garish color sheme is pretty rough believe it or not I did that by design.  I wanted everything to be easily seen and no misunderstanding about what each cue did.

The big red Xs on the left side there show you that I have moved my source files since the show. There are tuortials for this software all over the inter-webs. So church sound guys go download it and try it out. If you ever need precision audio cues, or sound effects, for what ever reason, THIS is the software for you.

A did this review a while back for church production on the clear-com tempest.
You can read the review here

Link to an article from Church Production Magazine this months issue.  I really enjoyed using this switcher, I wouldn’t mind moving over to this platform.  With the more churches moving to multi-sites 
The Solo/Cross over is a great scalable option, it would be able to get a great small switcher for less than 10K for the multi-site and have a Crossover 16 at the main campus.  This way you have a consistent format across the campuses.
See more here:
http://www.churchproduction.com/go.php/article/video_review_ross_crossover_solo_production_switcher_full_length_version

I always think we have a really large production…right up until I flip through Church Production Magazine.  Which is a great magazine, but I see pictures of video control rooms that are just HUGE and think to myself “I don’t even know what some of that stuff is.”  Which of course as a video professional is not an easy thing to admit.  Seriously though 5 years ago seems like all I ever heard about was the big 10 the *”NorthWillowLifeCrossBackPointe Church” or as my buddy Jim Kumorek says “First Mega Church of The Anointed”.  Now I see things and read things about lots churches I have never heard of, and they are all so much bigger then us.  The level of production at these places far surpasses ours.  I won’t lie it makes me a little bitter. 

Case in point, I ordered shirts for all our tech volunteers, with all the extras I ordered I got 90 shirts.  That was for our main campus and our multi-site ALL tech volunteers.  I believe ALL totaled we have 60-70 volunteers. For some perspective I went of to NPCC looks like North Point uses 40 volunteers a week.   Now I would never compare what we do to what they do, never … it’s apples and…. much much much smaller apples

This leads in to my title, so I ask myself this “why should it matter?”

Obviously it shouldn’t.  I can’t even begin to tell you how blessed we are as a church and how personally blessed I have been.  I wouldn’t even know where to start, and even if I tried I would miss/skip the vast majority of it.

That said, I am a flawed vessel.  I read the stats from North Point and I think to myself “man if only we could do that”  when my first reaction should be “Wow, it is so awesome that they can do that”

Mike made a great point in his message on love today that I think applies here.  He said I should be happy that a brother/sister in Christ is being blessed, and not bitter because it wasn’t me.  THAT is the way I should show my love for them.  I should be excited for them, and rejoice with them, and if I was loving them like I should this would be natural. 

So I say to myself and I say to anyone reading this, rejoice for/with the blessed, don’t harden your heart to them.  If you would love like you were suppose to this would flow naturally out of you, if it isn’t… then you and I know what we need to work on.

And if anyone for North Point is reading this; Ya’ll ROCK!! Keep up the good work!

*I wish I was clever enough to come up with that name… but it was CPM from Mike Sessler I stole it.

I got interviewed a while back for church production.  I was asked to talk about IMAG, which I could pretty much do for weeks at a time.  So it was a great interview, I got to talk about my passion and even got to throw my FOH guy a bone.  You can read the article here.