Cell Phone vs. Bible
Got this in an e-mail. Gave me a few video ideas:
I wonder what would happen if we treated our Bible like we treat our cell
phone?
-What if we carried it around in our purses or pockets?
-What if we flipped through it several times a day?
-What if we turned back to go get it if we forgot it?
-What if we used it to receive messages from the text?
-What if we treated it like we couldn’t live without it?
-What if we gave it to Kids as gifts?
-What if we used it when we traveled?
-What if we used it in case of emergency?
-Oh, and one more thing. Unlike our cellphone, we don’t have to worry about
our Bible being disconnected because Jesus already paid the bill.
Kickoff Brochure
This has been the monkey on my back this summer. No wait more like a gorilla beating me down. It’s a project I’ve been throwing around for a few years now but it got green lighted late in the game. I had 6 weeks for what I would have liked 12 weeks.
The project evolved from a newsletter to a brochure for the kickoff challenge. This was by far the biggest design job I’ve tackled. I learned a lot about InDesign and the printing process. The final project came out to 16 pages with a final dimension of 5.5 x 8.5. It’s at the printers now but I’m anxious to see a hard copy of it.
I believe this is going to be more effective than each LIFE group sending out multiple postcards. Some of the being designed well and some of them not so. It will hopefully cut the amount of mail we send out. All this and saving the church around $2,500 in production and mailing this brochure vs. each LIFE group sending out their own cards.
Kickoff Brochure
(It’s about a 1MB file)
Kickoff Challenge Insert
This fall we are making a strategic focus of getting our congregation to re-engage themselves with the church. We are doing this through our “Kickoff Challenge”. It’s also my first attempt at branding a message this big. You can see the video that plays on our digital signage here.
The biggest challenge was getting all the information on a page that easy to read and understand. We’ve asked for this kind of commitment for a few years now. In the past the cards were made by someone else. Those cards were 2 sided and some people never realized there was a back.
The style fits with the Kickoff Challenge identity which is the Rosewood title font and my standard Myriad Pro font for content. I also used paper textures for the background. It ties well into the video.
Over the last year I’ve been learning InDesign. This is a project that would have been a nightmare in Photoshop but really comes together in InDesign. The text engine in InDesign is awesome. It alone makes your text look better. Gives you more control. Allows you to flow text from frame to frame. And gives you tables to list your content in. I know this sounds simple but I started designing in Photoshop which has a basic text engine for blurbs. But when you move to a page layout program you realize the control you have over your design. Not to mention multiple page documents.
Weekend Recap
Here’s a quick recap of the graphics we used this weekend. Both of these were canned as I’ve been working under a deadline for our kickoff material. I should be able to get back into the habit of blogging more.
Saturday Night Jesse Prince talked about “Check the Expiration Date”. He was scheduled at the last minute and used a message he preached and I had prepared last year for a Sunday Service. I like the title slide. The sermon slide is OK and I really don’t like the font I used for the content. I find myself using Myriad Pro for all church communication (bulletin, slides, mailers). My small beginning at a style guide. Plus it’s a swiss army font use full for lots of stuff.
Sunday Pastor Bob Kelly preached on “The Reality of Answered Prayer”. The graphics were modified from Vine Resources. I really like the style of their stuff but they don’t update it very often. For canned graphics I like how this one came out. I cheated a little and used a drop shadow on my content to help it pop from the background. I would have liked to use the effect of the title text on the content but it was 3 layers with different blending modes stacked on each other.
Sermon Graphics: Man vs. World
We’ve been working hard to get our 1st Ministry Magazine finished. So I haven’t had much time to post. Hopefully that will change soon.
Anyway here’s the graphics we used this weekend. One of our associate pastors talked on attitude and wrapped it within the context of Man vs. Wild. I emulated to type treatment with Trajen Pro. The coloring and bevel effect are not identical to the show. I used a background from Midnight Oil that I had on hand.
Hope to post more about the magazine this week.
Right Tool For The Right Job
This guy wrote a 384 page sci-fi novel on his cell phone. Using T9 of course.
Just because a tool can do something does it mean it’s the best tool for the job?
CS3 Master Suite Finally Here
As I said the other day I’ve been working on a MacBook Pro. That means it’s running intel chips and I’ve been working with Adobe’s Creative Suite CS2 and Macromedia Studio MX2004. Both of those suites are not native so they run slower under Rosetta. Granted those apps under Rosetta are still faster than my old PowerBook.
Well the CS3 Master Suite finally got here yesterday. I went with the Master Suite because to get the Design Suite + After Effects with their non-profit pricing was less than $100 to get the master collection.
The collection came in 3 DVD cases. 1st case had 4 DVDs for the applications. 2nd case had 2 disks: 1 for content and 1 for On Location which looks very cool but has to run under windows. 3rd case has a disk from Lynda.com with 13 hours of training for the suite.
I removed any CS3 trials and betas and used the Adobe CS3 Clean Up Script. Instillation took about 2.5 hours. It took about 20 GB of hard drive space. Overall it went smoothly.
So far the apps are much faster than their CS2 counterparts. Launching 50% to 70% faster after a restart. I haven’t spent enough time digging though the apps to really comment on them as a whole but I will soon.
I don’t know if I’ll keep the whole video suite installed. PremierePro/ Encoe/ Soundbooth take up about 10 GB. Won’t run on my G5 because they require an Intel-Mac. And I have and know Final Cut Pro. I started on FCP 2 and currently have Final Cut Studio 1.
Now I can de-authorize CS2 and Studio MX2004 and move them over to my old PowerBook for someone else at church to use.
Anyway it’s getting late and I need to get some work done.
What I’m Working On: MacBook Pro
A brief history. I’ve been a mac user since around 2002 I think. While I was working with the youth ministry and cutting my video teeth on premiere with a matrox rt card, the church bought a dual G4 500 mhz power mac and final cut pro 2.0. Shortly after making the switch I talked my wife into getting an iBook (G3 600 mhz 20 gb hd).
Flash forward to now. I have a dual 2.0 ghz power mac at the church. For the last few years I’ve been using a PowerBook (1.67 Ghz 1 GB Ram) the last model that was made 2 or 3 years ago. My current workload has found me doing a lot more motion graphics using After Effects and print work in Photoshop and InDesign. And my PowerBook was starting to crawl with some of these files. I found myself making creative decisions based on render times and not what I wanted to do.
About a month ago I got a MacBook Pro when they were updated. Here’s the specs:
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB Ram
160 GB HD
256 MB Ram
15″ LED display
Core software I’m using every week:
Final Cut Studio (it’s the universal version of the 1st suite)
Create Suite CS2 (I have Master Collection CS3 pre-ordered and just found out it’s on it’s way to me)
Macromedia Studio MX2004
Here’s my impressions after a month:
-This thing is fast. It renders out of Final Cut Pro, Motion, Compressor, AE CS3 beta faster than my PowerMac dual 2.0 G5. Non native apps (CS2) are slower but much faster than my PowerBook and close to the G5. I am eagerly waiting for CS3. It’s shipped so hopefully I’ll have it this week.
-The display looks great and is super bright. Better than the 19″ samsung displays I have with the G5. I find myself actually turning the brightness down a few steps most of the time except in bright lights.
-This laptop runs cooler than my PowerBook for most of the time. The fans do kick in more often but it’s cooling 2 processors in roughly the same space as 1 in my powerbook.
-The laptop is actually 15.5″ so it didn’t fit in my older Brenthaven bag. So I had to get a new bag. I didn’t like anything that Brenthaven offers now. I like the messenger style and lots of pockets. Brenthaven’s bag only had a few big pockets instead of lots of smaller pockets. So I got a bbp bag and it rocks. Not as much protection for my laptop but it fits more and is much more comfortable.
-This laptop has frontrow which I thought was kind of goofy at first but it’s great for watching videos (DVD or content from iTunes)
-It also has a built isight which my 2 year old loves to use with photobooth and video confrencing with our friends Aaron and Jeanette.
-My main grip with the laptop is that Apple changed the USB bus structure. I don’t know how or why but it gives ProTools a fit. I have a problem recording with a Mbox 1 but have no problem with an Mbox Mini. The mini has a larger hardware buffer. With the Mbox 1 if I am recording 1 track to an external drive and open another app it would cause ProTools to stop. With the Mbox Mini I can be recording a track, open up After Effects or Motion and render a file out. Do I do this on a regular basis? No but I wanted to see how much I could throw at it. We use ProTools to record the pastor’s sermon and sometimes I get online with Safari.
I can’t wait to get all my software and plugins running native on the mac. I’m sure I’ll post more when I get CS3 up and running.
Kickoff Promo rev 1.3
I was using the same text reveal for all the pages. I changed the reveal up to give it a little variety.
What I’m Still Reading: Church Marketing 101
As I’ve said before it can take me awhile to make it through a book. Here’s a thought that stood out to me. Reising was talking about branding. In branding he talked about knowing your target audience. Then designing to appeal to that target audience instead of my own desires and likes.
It struck me with the analogy of using food I like as fish bait. I don’t know how effective that would be. Granted I have more in common with a person who doesn’t go to church than I do with any fish. So the analogy breaks down pretty quick. But it got me thinking that I need to filter my designs through the eyes of someone in my community who doesn’t go to church. Does it appeal to their perceived needs? Is it appealing to them? Is it clear to understand what to act upon?
I also realized I need to work on identifying and putting word pictures to the different audiences/ target groups the various ministries of our church reaches. Reising talks about knowing the target audience of your church. I think that gets tougher the larger your church gets. Most larger churches offer more ministries to reach more groups of people. We run over 4,000 on a weekend and have at least 12 services (3 children, 3 youth, 3 adults, 2 spanish, 1 young adult) to reach various target groups and different times. Not to mention the dozens of LIFE groups that range in size from a dozen to around 100.
Creative Church Media 