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.

Well reality stepped in to my dream the other day because the first chapter of the book practically wrote it self right in front of me.  One of our first impression staff (who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent… for now) made an off handed comment about “estimating banana consumption based on the availability of bagels” and I said to myself “if that isn’t a quirky chapter title Acuff would be proud of, I don’t know what is.”  The phrase just struck me as so oddly fascinating that I had to get more details. So, intrigued I journeyed down the hall to hear more.

It turns out making sure the multi-site volunteers have food is one of the responsibilities this person has, and she was actually trying to figure out how many bananas would be eaten if other food was available.  When put that way it doesn’t sound so strange, but when I hear “I am trying to estimate banana consumption based on the availability of bagels” my mind flashes back to high school math class and word problems with a trains leaving such-and-such traveling at something-or-other ect…

Just the fact that this was a legitimate quandary someone seriously had, someone actually not only cares about this but is diligently exploring a way to come up with a potential solution to the banana consumption query.  How many people in the congregation know that someone on staff actually takes a part of their day and dedicates to trying to discern how many bananas will be eaten by volunteers this weekend?  How many who even eat the bananas think about the fact someone on staff came up with the idea they needed to feed the volunteers, had to come up with a budget for said food, and then procure the food. The little detail tasks like this eat up so much time for church staff it really is amazing that we can get anything done at all. It’s like a death by a million  paper cuts, no single one is really going to do much, but collectively it’s another story.

What little time consuming paper cuts do you have?

Well it turns out that it is easier to “think straight” when you have reduced the amount of information your brain is trying to process.  Don’t believe me? Ever been thinking real hard about something, I mean really focused on some problem solving, where the solution is continually eluding you? Ever paid attention to what you do when you are doing that?

Most people cover their eyes with their hand.

Admit it you do that! I know I do.  Scientist have studied this and proven that this “noise reduction” helps lead to insight and epiphany.

Intrigued?

I am reading through Jonah Lehrer’s book Imagine, on the suggestion of Joe Woolworth (Twitter, Blog) I am 2 chapters in and I may just stay up and read through the night, the book is THAT good.

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.

At the 4th service today the congregation did the oddest thing.   The band was doing a song after the message, not something we do all the time but something we do often enough that it shouldn’t be a surprise to our church. Typically when we are done our senior pastor prays; then says a few words and dismisses the congregation, or he does announcements then dismisses, or we do a song then he says somethings and dismisses. However as soon as our high school pastor said “Amen” in his prayer, the band started playing again, which is how we do that transition most of the time. Rather then stand and sing or even sit and listen the congregation simply got up and walked out. In the middle of the song. In the dark. before they were dismissed.  I am not sure I can do justice to the awkwardness of this in this post.

Of all the possible outcomes in that scenario that was not a predicted reaction.  Also it didn’t happen at the other 3 services. I felt really bad for the band, they had a great song left that no one got to hear.   Sadly really think that since the tournament was on and we were 5 minutes over they all just called it a day.  Seriously, it was oddest thing I have ever seen in my time doing church tech.  That said it raises a good question, how intentional are you about your transitions between service elements? Have you ever had awkward transitions?

Coolest use of technology: Kim possible scavenger hunt- If you have never heard of this it here’s how it works;at Epcot they give you a cell phone with clues and pictures that tells you to be some place and look for something, when you find it the phone sends a signal that makes the something do… well something.  For example we had to find a stein display in germany, when we did the steins started singing to us.  Then we had to find a glockenspiel (still don’t know what that is) when we did it set off this 6 ft tall cuckoo clock thing it was AWESOME!

Coolest Ride: Toy Story- This was a tough one, and the winner is only technically a ride, yeah you sit in a little car and it moves but the best part of this ride is the 3D shoot’um up aspect it basically moved you around to different target ranges and you shoot the targets with a 3d animated nerf gun.

Biggest surprise: Voyage of the little mermaid- Well here is the thing, my youngest has this thing for Ariel, so we ended up at this show… the special effects were REALLY cool! I knew we were in for something good when they opened the doors and the haze was so thick it literally poured out.  At one point they use a laser through some kind of beam splitter to make a false ceiling of laser light and then rained water through it … yeah cool stuff.

Best projection: Cinderella’s castle- So for this one the geek in me wants more info, cause I saw where the projectors were these things HAVE to be 2-3 hundred feet away minimum.  There were 2 double stacks per section (4 projectors, one side looked like it had 6) hitting at least different atleast 4 different sections.  I can’t even speculate on specs, but I would love to know what they were using cause it looked like a million bucks…. which coincidentally is prolly what they paid for them.

Environmental Projection

Biggest “How did they do that?”: Turtle talk with crush- this one was cool mainly because my oldest got picked to talk to Crush first and got asked a bunch of questions, and then Crush asked ME a bunch of questions.  Which really has me wondering how it’s done, which of course causes my wife to go search these things out.  Rather then explain it check out this article.

Biggest disappointment: Me- Yeah like something from Disney was going to make this one.  Pride got the better of me  and yes a I am a little ashamed… At one point during one of the fireworks show the guy next to me was snapping pics as fast as he could (which was not very fast) and in a moment of pride I ramped up my 7D to high speed and snapped out 3 bazillion pictures in about 2.3 seconds just cause I could.  yeah I felt a little bad about it later, but not much

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.