Ok I liked him before this video, but his stock just went WAY up in my book!
CTW Coverage: Gurus 2013—Lincoln Brewster from Mike Sessler on Vimeo.
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So I guess I am going to be making this an annual thing. Things that have changed since last year; the multiplexed feed last year was done on a miranda kieldo alto attached to our FSR Eagle 300. We don’t use either of those pieces of gear anymore.
On a totally unrelated note I have some surplus video equipment for sale.
We are using a Ross Carbonite, to handle our video switching, the cameras 1&2 are Panasonic AG HPX-500, camera 3,4,&6 are Panasonic AG HPX 370. BGBC and BGBL background center and left off a mac pro running propresenter with the multi-screen module (awesome FYI) on a triple head to go. This generates center and lower lyrics at the same time. BGA is… you guessed it background A. Also the real geeks out there will notice that camera 3&4 are frame synced, that was because their genlock cables both broke over the course of the weekend and rather then try and get that fixed during service I just headed that problem off at the pass. Lesson learned from Reason #372 I love my Ross Carbonite.
So Christmas came early at Hope this year. My Carbonite arrived last month, we redesigned our entire video room to get it inline. In the process we cut out about 600 lbs. of body fat out of the room. We replaced our 40 U rack (which was full) for a 12 (which has space). The Carbonite has been awesome, my volunteers learned out to get through a service really quickly. Right after we got it in we had one of our large kids events, I had to figure out how to replicate some of the things we did with the old switcher. Namely a black and white and sepia effects for the production. Continue Reading…
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.
Today was a strange day at our church. Let me set the scene for you. Our regular teaching/senior/founding pastor is in Uganda on a mission trip checking, among other things, the feasibility of us doing family mission trips there. So this weekend our high school pastor and the high school worship band (read as the band that plays for out high school kids, not the band made up by our high school kids) handled “big church” today. In the past when other speakers and worship leaders are given opportunities like this the programing team has been careful to point out that it usually works best if whoever it is doesn’t deviate from our standard template too far. This weekend our high school crew did a good job, Donnie was a great speaker and Jake and his band sounded awesome. We had a few kinks that we fixed, minor transition details ect…, and by the second service things were going good. Continue Reading…
So the family and I took a 5 day long trip to Disney this past week. I think the best way to sum up my thoughts is in an award style post, so here we go:(oh spoiler alert YOU WERE WARNED)
For Christmas this year we went to see my parents who have recently moved pretty close to us. So the family congregated not far from our house. There were 11 of us in the house for Christmas dinner and what I found most interesting about this large group of people is that I was only blood related to 4 of the 11, and 2 of those are MY kids. Now I love my family and we all get along pretty well together and we make the whole family thing work, but it still strikes me as odd that all these random people I call family aren’t really related to me. Yes it’s dysfunctional, yes it’s broken, but I find it reassuring that it is those very same areas that God has the opportunity to do the most work. A friend of mine, Micheal Dean Chadwick, always says when God can’t find a straight stick he will use a crooked one.
I don’t watch a lot of sports, I may watch the championship game in most sports, but not much else. Part of the reason for this is the time I my career where I followed teams and players around the country for basketball games. I got to know some of the up and coming pros today before they were household names, and to be honest a good chunk of them were arrogant self-centered children with bad entitlement issues, and still are. Now I know I am painting with a wide brush there, but it’s what I saw. So when I read something like this story it gives me hope that money and fame doesn’t ruin all of them. Like I said I don’t keep up with sports but Braylon Edwards could easily be my favorite NFL player now. That is a level of generosity that is really just unprecedented. The fact that he not only came through with a promise he made to a bunch of kids 6 years ago, that no one in their right mind would have held him to, he didn’t stop there. “The 79 students were provided with laptops and other supplies to help them out when they arrived on campus.” I can’t say enough how encouraging it is to read things like this, Braylon Edwards if you are reading this… YOU are the man!
Some of you may know by now that my ponytail started tweeting in the middle of the Christmas production this past weekend. @MarkHsPonyTail
The reason for this… turns out I didn’t keep @joewoolworth busy enough. In a fit of boredom inspired creativity, he came up with the idea that my ponytail should be tweeting. 5 minutes later my ponytail had an account and all of the volunteer team for that night was following it. The next time you think your volunteer staff is giving you a hard time just check out some of the tweets from my ponytail, which apparently “did all it’s own stunts in Disney’s Tangled.” My volunteers immediately jumped in with suggested tweets, and by the end of the day they had almost 100 tweets, 20 followers and wait for it….merchandise. Yeah you read that right ponytail has it’s own brand. So it saddens me a little that my ponytail is destine to overshadow my real social media presence, which admittedly would not be a tough, but it saddens me none the less.
