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!

So, What Would You Have Done?

OK, our October series is called "Monsters." The pastor wanted to use the Halloween season to talk about how there are actually monsters in the church.

His series is really quite ingenious. Week One was about Jeckyll & Hyde, or the dual-nature of man. Yesterday was about witchcraft and manipulation. He's got another one on The Mummy, which will deal with new creatures still wrapped up in their grave clothes. The last one will be something about a wolf-man, probably wolves in sheep's clothing.

So, anyway, what do you do for a sermon opener? You can't try to make it scary, because of parents (who should have their kids in children's church anyway) will complain that their kids (the same ones who should have been in children's church - are you getting the feeling it's an issue with me?) won't be able to sleep at night after being scared at church (never mind the fact that they get all the demonic images they can ever want from the TV).

Well, this is what we came up with:

I had to go funny and kitschy. It seemed it was my only option. Of course, we had to put a little shot in there that said we are pros. Gotta have a little eye candy, with the "how'd they do that?" factor.

So, what do you think? What would you have done?

Friday Funny

Okay, instead of the usual pic, I've posted a video of my youngest daughter. She and her mother were waiting in the car for my oldest daughter, and my wife wanted to capture some video of her singing while listening to some Aly & AJ on her sister's iPod Shuffle. What happened, however, was COMPLETELY unplanned!

It seems that she got a little mixed up between "cappuccino" and "Frappuccino!"

Any comments?

Back From Vacation!

Well, the 11-day Gaspard vacation is over, and it's back to work tomorrow. For the full details of our vacation, go here. It's my wife's blog, and she has all the dirt on the trip (as well as most everything else in our lives).

On another, more relevant-church-media note, our new lighting console should be installed by this weekend. I may post some pics of it in action.

I Just Found Out that I'm a Hero

My wife was checking my 10-year-old's penmanship homework tonight, and she ran across an assignment worksheet about heroes. Here are the two questions, and her answers (in parentheses):

1. What qualities and character traits will a hero have? (brave, encouraging, loyal, trustworthy, honest)

2. Whom do you admire? (The person I most admire is probably my dad. He doesn't really do anything important, but isn't everyone's dad their hero? I really look up to my dad, no really, he's pretty tall. Okay, I'll admit that I'm actually really short. But anyway, the person I admire the most is my one and only...DAD!)

OK, I'm not sure why she thinks that someone who has devoted his entire life to the ministry doesn't do anything important, but I'm proud to know that my little girl (who's getting less little every day) thinks I'm a hero.

Batman, eat your little bat heart out!