I Saw the Light (kits)

Crossroads Creative does a lot of field production when producing its pieces for use at Crossroads Church, and to sell on our website. Well, it's been six years, almost to the day, since I purchased my two Lowell Elemental kits.

They've been faithful workhorses, but tomorrow, I order two ARRI kits. The first consists of 4 1Ks with stands, scrims, barn doors, and case.

The second one consists of 2 600s and 2 300s with all the aforementioned accessories.

Once I have the new ones in, we'll do a little refurbishing of the old ones, and they'll go to our youth ministry. I'll probably (cases permitting) make up two identical sets, both consisting of 2 1Ks, a 600, and a 300.

All in all, I'm pretty excited about this transition, for a couple of reasons. First, it's always great to get new gear, especially stuff that is as great as the products manufactured by good old Arnold & Richter. Secondly, it's quite fulfilling to have gotten so much mileage out of the Lowells, which are viewed by many to be nothing more than pro-sumer grade stuff. I've literally produced about 1000 short films/commercials/sermon intros/TV shows with these, and they've performed well.

During my tenure at Crossroads Church (and Crossroads Creative), I've done my best to take care of what I have, so that not only do we get great usage, but great usage for a long period of time. I view all o my purchases as pretty serious investments, knowing that I'm spending God's money, money entrusted to me by faithful tithers and givers. I certainly wouldn't want to ever do anything that would not only ruin the trust that's been placed in me and my position, but more importantly, I wouldn't want to do anything foolish with that which is considered to be holy.

So, it's progress as promised, with no regrets...

The Numbers Are In

I just got the numbers for this past weekend's services at Crossroads Church. We had over 3300 in attendance (we normally run around 2200-2400), and there were over 100 first-time salvations. Praise God for the great harvest!

BTW, I started doing the post-audio work on the production, and I think I'm done. I'll give it another listen tomorrow, and hopefully have a post of the production soon.

Satan's Own Calendar

Okay, I've got it figured out...

As I sit here, watching "The Ten Comandments" with my daughters (don't ask...), eating Easter candy leftovers, I've just had a revelation.

My enemy, Satan, has finely crafted a scheme to keep me fat. He has set up the American calendar to arrange it so that just when I'm doing well, another event comes along to blow my diet. Here's the list:

January:  New Year's Day

February:  Valentine's Day

March/April:  Easter

May:  Mother's Day

June:  Father's Day

July:  Independence Day

August:  My birthday

September:  Labor Day

October:  Halloween

November:  Thanksgiving

December:  Christmas

And then it all repeats again, year after year, pound after miserable pound. If these were the only times I ate, then it wouldn't be a big deal, but c'mon, give me a break!

Great Weekend

It was a great weekend for us at Crossroads Church. Our production went off well, despite the fact that our "Peter" character made an entrance 30 seconds late in our largest service (yes we actually rolled back the tape and timed that late entry!).

I don't have the final numbers of attendance and decisions, but when I find out, I'll post them. All I know is that these numbers are large. It may have been a record for us.

Once it's all post-edited, I'll put it up on the site. But be patient...I still have to do a  shoot to replace some video in the sermon opener, and SEVEN songs to remix!

I hope you all had a great holiday!

Praying Over Your Tech Team

My good friend, Jim Walton, has an excellent post on his blog Church Tech Matters. It's about praying over your team and gear. I couldn't agree more.

BTW, this guy has it going on. He has really turned things around at the church he attends. His blog totally worth bookmarking. He talks a lot about IT stuff, which is not in my sphere (usually), but the ministry principles he discusses are great.

Great job, Jim.

It's Pretty Much Over...

I just got home from a 4-hour rehearsal for our Easter Production at Crossroads Church. Our current series is entitled "Betrayal" and we're doing a Judas vs. Peter thing. The twist is that most of the live acting takes place behind a huge hound's tooth scrim.

It holds significance for me, because my wife and I wrote it. She wrote all of the live drama stuff, and I wrote the scripts for the videos.

Our two videos include one where we see four different people who are about to betray someone, either a boss, a spouse, a best friend, or an expecting girlfriend. The other features the same four people, except we realize that they did not commit betrayal after all.

We've even worked in Hoobastank's "The Reason," and a revamped version of the 25-year-old "Judas Kiss," by none other than Petra.

Anyway, after our two run-throughs on Saturday, it's out of my hands. I'm just a spectator at that point.

Leapin' Leopards!

Well, I finally did it. We changed over to Leopard...almost.

At the beginning of the year, I upgraded my laptop from a 1.67 PowerBook to a dual 2.6 MacBook Pro, and got an iMac or our office manager. My other production computers are:  two quad 3.0 Mac Pros (one for video and one for audio), and (keeping the retro theme alive) a dual 2.7 G5 for graphics. They all have Leopard now, so bring on the simplified connectivity and organization!

We have two other Macs for presentation in the main auditorium:  a dual 2.0 G5 (running ProPresenter) and a dual 1.86 Mini (running PowerPoint for teleprompter and pre-service announcements). They're both getting Leopard this week.

Another cool thing I'm doing this week is upgrading the RAM for our audio and video computers. Audio is getting 4GB, and video is getting 8GB, which should help our new AfterEffects CS run a little quicker (just in time for editing our Easter production pieces!). The graphics G5 already has about 5 GB of RAM, so we're set there. BTW, I don't buy RAM from Apple, because it's way cheaper at Crucial.

All in all, I love working on Mac. We used to have an Avid Xpress 3.0 on a 512 MHz PC, but I ditched that nonsense four years ago and never looked back.

Covering the Base

This past weekend, Crossroads Church embarked on a two-week series entitled "Covering the Base." The first message was used as our annual volunteer signup weekend. Crossroads is a church of around 2,300 in attendance (out of the 3,500 or who actually consider it their church), and we had around 230 adults sign up to volunteer in one of six ministries featured.

This morning, I read a post by my friend Greg Atkinson. His post was about, strangely enough, recruiting volunteers, and sharing with others what we know. I felt moved to make an offer to his readers, and I'm extending it to mine also.

Check out our site where you can view the sermon on the NORTH page. The sermon will be up until March 11th or so. If the concept is something your pastor might be interested in, Crossroads Creative will send it to you, free of charge. Simply leave a reply with your email address, or email me at richard@mycrossroads.org and you'll get:

Covering the Base sermon intro

Signup card (flattened .psd file)

Signup card (layered .psd file)

Pastor Jeff Ables' sermon notes

Anyway, I'm just trying to help further the cause.