Flip-Flops, Part 1 of 4

Our current series is called "Flip-Flops." We wanted to do a little summertime fun thing, so we decorated the auditorium with palm trees and made little tiki huts and so forth. Everyone on stage wore leis, and we even had a guy playing steel pan drums in the foyer.

So, what do you do for a sermon opener? Glad you asked. My idea was to do a little take-off on the Corona "Miles Away From Ordinary" TV campaign, making a pair of old flip-flops the hero, instead of the aforementioned Mexican beer. Our graphic artist has a relative who lives on Dauphin Island, AL, so we planned a little media dept. trip (I know, suffering for the cause...)

Since the videos would be relatively easy to shoot, we decided to do a custom sermon opener video for each week of the four-week series.

Here's Part 1's video, in its raw form, complete with my directions, bad grammar and all:

Of course, the Corona ads are all set in a tropical paradise, and the Gulf Coast of Alabama is hardly such, so, with a little post-production magic, and a whole lot of talent and patience from our editor, added in with a little bit of audio spotting from yours truly (actually none of the audio is real), we ended up with this:

Anyway, it was great fun to do these pieces. I'll post the rest of them (pre- and post-mojo) once they're done.

Best Seat in the House

Yesterday I got to do something I rarely do:  run sound at church. It's not that I can't, I'm just always doing something else [playing bass, singing, supervising our TV production crew, doing TV audio, MBWA (management by walking around)], etc.

Our PA engineer hasn't had a weekend off in a long time, and all of the other engineers we use were busy, so I got the call. Here are the pics:

From my vantage point to the stage: 

And a little lower so you can see the console:

Here's a shot of this past weekend's lighting operator, George. He's a smooth Romanian who just became an American by marrying into the fold. Great guy.

Here's Jeff.  This was his first weekend training on Presentation, and he nailed it on the first go-round. Welcome aboard Jeff!

On my other side was the other Jeff, my boss, the pastor of the church. He's a great singer, and big-time music lover, and he knows what sounds good. No pressure there!

By the way, he's playing shaker with a small tin of Altoids.

The Yamaha LS-9 is a GREAT little console. We just added some channels on the digital side with two Presonus DigiMax LTs (you can see them in the rack) running through an ADAT card. Our eight wireless mics sound amazing through the LTs, as do our eight tracks lines.

All in all, I thought things went pretty well. I got a few compliments, and no glaring looks.

That counts for something, right?

Inaugural Address

This past weekend, we started our new sermon series. Our pastor wanted to do a message series about vision and goal setting (which he does every January), so with the concurrence of a truly historic presidential inauguration, his idea was to do a series titled "Inaugural Address."

So...what do you do with that? Well, this is what we came up with...

All of the audio after the first shot was 100% post-production. None of it is real. Not even the footsteps. I'm the voice of the courier and the announcer at the end, our graphic artist is the voice of the lady, and our editor is the voice of the presidential aide/secret service guy.

I really hope you like it!

The Media Director Has No Clothes

OK, interesting thing about me...

I'm used to working on good gear. When I was at Oral Roberts TV, I had great consoles with awesome monitors. At Crossroads, I've got some great cameras, editing gear, and some pretty decent audio tools (not to be confused with ProTools - ecch. I'm a Logic user).

So, what does a guy who has access to all this great stuff have as his personal gear? When I was at ORU, when people would come over to my house, they were surprised to see how low-end my home stereo was, and invariably, the conversation went somewhat like this...

"Dude, you're the Chief Audio Engineer at Oral Roberts Television.  That's your stereo!?"

"Yes. If I wanted to listen to CDs on $750K worth of gear, I would just drive to the studio."

Which brings me to my point...I just bought my first camcorder. What is it? Here it is...

It's a Crayola camcorder that records to SD card. It's the crappiest/cutest thing I've ever seen. It's for my youngest daughter, and we bought it yesterday with her $30 Wal-Mart gift card.

This thing is LITTLE ya'll. The photos don't do it justice. The camera is half the distance from the iSight camera than we are.

For a sample, visit my wife's blog. By broadcast standards, it's crappy indeed (the camera quality, not the blog), but not too bad considering how much compression goes into a typical Bloggger video. The real deal is this:  I get the pleasure of helping the Katie Mac launch her film career. Once she masters the Crayola, an ARRIFLEX D-21 will be no big deal!

Back to My Other Job...

Yeah, you read that right.  Our department has a recording studio that we hire out for external clients.  I've been working on a CD for the past few months, and today, we're working on some clean-up, and maybe vocals.

Monday is my day off, but I use it for the external client thing, so that I can legally and ethically charge my own fee.

Which brings me to my point:  double-dipping. I've seen a whole lot of this in ministry. Guys doing outside work on ministry gear, and charging the client their own fee, all while on company time.

I see nothing wrong in making the extra money with the church's gear, as long as the senior pastor approves it, but it's the other part I have the problem with:  making the extra money while at your regular job. When I perform duties for an outside client. I MAKE SURE that I'm not on the Crossroads clock (I'm salaried, btw). I was not hired to make my own side money while supposedly being there for Crossroads Church.

On the other hand, I've also seen the situation where a church's media department cannot perform outside work on their own. It has to be performed as part of their duties for their department, and the church makes all the money. I'm too much of a capitalist to agree to work at a place like that.

Anyway, that's my soapbox for today. Do you know of guys who do this? Do YOU do this? What's your policy regarding outside client stuff?

The Night That Will Not be Discussed Again...

My church NEVER has technical issues. Our gear is great, our tech team operates like a well-oiled machine, and our services run flawlessly.

So, what the heck happened last night!?

During the 4 pm band rehearsal, none of our in-ears' mixes were right. Our console was accidentally reset (I guess), and all of the settings were lost. If this were the only issue of the night, it'd be no big deal, BUT...

This was only a foreshadowing of things to come.

We had guest speakers, who are missionaries to Africa (yeah, cliche, but true). I found out (at 3 pm) that the wife was going to sing, and we had to hook up floor wedges. Again, no big deal, except that she had a PowerPoint to show DURING her song(s). Also, NBD, except that they sorta got lost on the way to the church, and got there at about 10 minutes before service. We loaded the PowerPoint on our teleprompter, and were set. Obviously, she got no soundcheck, but our sound guy's pretty good (really good, in fact), so that didn't worry me.

But then, IT happened.

At right about service time (6 pm), I heard my name being paged. ProPresenter, our presentation software, wasn't playing audio. the computer had audio, but not the program. Weird. I restarted the program. No result. Restarted the computer. No result. Shut down the computer. No result. Downloaded update. No result. Reset program display preferences defaults. BINGO, we have sound. The audience actually applauded when the countdown started (probably the first time in history a church congregation has given an ovation to a countdown video!).

We could have started service without our two-minute video countdown, but we REALLY needed video for the service; it was Baby Dedication weekend (which are all on video). The band was ready to start without the countdown, but guess who the bass player was his weekend? Yep, you guessed it...me!

Okay, the two-minute countdown ended, and worship started. No problems. First song over, Baby Dedication video plays. Perfect. Second worship song. Fine. Then, the drummer was VERY late starting the click for the third song, so the worship leader decided to kill it (we started 15 min. late because of the aforementioned ProPresenter glitch) and just move forward with the service...as the drummer started clicking off the third song. It was as if the whole band (and most of the congregation) was yelling "Nooooooooo" in slow motion.

The worship pastor had the congregation sit down, as our presentation operator rolled our announcements video. No sound. I actually heard people sigh and "ohhh" in disappointment.

So we skipped the announcements and proceeded with verbal announcements and offering message. When we went to start the special song (Natalie Grant's "I Will Not Be Moved," which is a bit of a rocker) the drummer rolled the click for the not-played third worship song, a COMPLETE ballad! The look on his face was priceless. Better still was the sound of the supposed electric guitar volume swell that lasted about 15 seconds longer than it should have. The swell started, crested and faded out BEFORE the click even started!

So, we got through that, all of us wondering "What could go wrong next?" I don't know why people have to ask that, because about 5 minutes later, our accountant's husband (who's also a board member, and Saturday night service's head usher) tripped the alarm in the accounting office! The best part about that is that he didn't know the code (to his wife's own department), so he had to call her. Obviously, that took longer than the grace period afforded once you trip the alarm. So...WAAWAAWAAWAAWAAWAAWAAWAAWAA!!!!!! the alarm went off.

Oh yeah, our lighting board we have temp-ed in because ours is not functioning correctly, is not functioning correctly. A couple of the lighting scenes mysteriously went dark WHILE THE PREACHER WAS ONSTAGE!

Several of us tried to explain to our ministry guests that this stuff never happens. We may have over-compensated, because I'm not sure they bought it, although, the missionary's wife did make a comment like "the devil really hates us."

After service, I got ProPresenter to work. It turns out that there is a bug in their program. I notified them, and a fix is on the way.

Has this absolute craziness ever happended to any of you? Please say yes!

The End of an Era

OK, remember a while back, I blogged about our PAS cluster horns blowing? Well, as of 11:09 am CST, they're gone. A local audio company has worked us a deal on replacing them with a NEXO rig.  Paul McCasland and his guys came over this morning, and within an hour, we had these suckers down (by means of two hand cranks located above the ceiling - yikes!), apart, and on the truck. In a couple of weeks, the NEXO PS15s will be in place and we'll be a rockin'! We currently have a pair of PS15s and a Pair of PS8s temped in, and we're running full stereo (the way God intended).

This change represents the official end of all the gear of the previous regime, all the (old and antiquated) gear I inherited when I got this job. We how have all new QSC amps (3 years ago), Shure PSM-600 wireless in-ear monitors, a new Yamaha LS9 console, and the NEXOs are on their way. We're also about to do some major stuff with our TV audio, but that's a post for a later day...

Progress. Nothin' like it.