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Merry Christmas from the Widney's

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The Warmth of the Season

Anthony Barlich of Barlich Photography photographed our Lessons & Carols service. Here are a couple of his shots from the evening. 


We spent the first part of the Christmas season in a purposefully cold stark setting. We were focusing on the simplicity of the event of Christmas. The theme was designed to contrast what the rest of the world does for Christmas. The last half of the month I wanted to create a lush warm environment but still maintain the non traditional aspect of our setting. Throughout the month there was no element that was traditionally Christmas decor.

The Red Candle

In the midst of building the Christmas set with all the candles, an artist friend of mine called and told me I needed one red candle on stage. This candle would represent the death of christ and the blood that was shed for all of humanity.

I ran by Michael's and grabbed the candle. We had the stand in storage. I placed six white candles around the red candle and took the blow torch to it all. I melted the red candle last so you got the red wax on top of everything else.

The candles sat center stage and a shot of them created the perfect backdrop for our lyrics during communion.

Lessons & Carols via Twitter

We did a service this year called Lessons & Carols an adaption of Nine Lessons & Carols an historic service format. We ended up with 800+ candles on stage. Here are some shots from Twitter of the night. I will post more soon with pictures of how we constructed the set.

CHRISTMAS.

Christmas was always simple.  

An inn with no room, a manger with a baby, a teenage girl in an unknown town, and some shepherds that celebrated the arrival of God on earth. Christmas was never intended to come along with the all of the flash and stress that now surrounds this holiday. It was intended to celebrate the incarnation and now has become more about consumerism and our western culture.  


So this year at Park we decided to go simple. 

No screens. 

Little Technology. 

Old Songs. 

The Birth Narrative in Luke 1 & 2 for four weeks.  

Simple not for effect, but because we believe that if we could remove the inevitable distractions that come our way this time of year and remember that the incarnation, God being made flesh and dwelling among us, is real that it will change our lives all over again.

This is how we do it.

Annual reports at a church are usually presented before an evening service or for 15 min during a service. The report is primarily centered around a Powerpoint presentation with graphs and lots of numbers. It is often presented by the administrative pastor who has very little, if any stage presence.

We wanted to take a different approach to educating our people on the financials of the church. Our goal was to provide a high level overview with enough numbers to satisfy those who want to know but with enough energy to still keep the rest of us engaged.

More of the same... in a fun way

This week we launched our Global Impact Week, our version of your typical missions Sunday. Tim Schraeder, our communication director, blogged about it here so I'll just let you read about it there.

As far as the set I turned the towers square for the first time so the projections were not distorted. I had designed these prayer stations that represented each of our 5 global initiatives. It was a great design that coordinated with the set. It was one of those ideas that looked great on paper and sucked when I built them. I tried several different versions of them before I gathered everything up and hauled it to the back stage storage. I hate that part of creativity!

Here are a couple of shots from the weekend.

Versatility

When designing our fall set I wanted it to be versatile. Each tower has 2 LED fixtures and 8-100w bulbs randomly hung from the top. This allows the towers to have very versatile looks. A couple of weeks ago I placed the towers closer together and used our center projector to project video on them. The effect was really nice and added another level of versatility to the set. In the next couple of weeks I am going to make 12’X4’ crosses out of florescent bulbs for each tower, so be sure and check back for pictures.

Common items

I always look for ways to use materials you see every day in new ways. Here's a practical illustration of how to use a common material.

HOW THEY USE COROPLAST

HOW I USE COROPLAST

Any Questions?

Trying something a little different

So, every church I have ever work for always struggles with announcements. How many to have each week, live or video, do you let people walk up right before service and add announcements? These are just a few of the issues I have seen over the years.

We try to consistently try to do Video announcements because of the control of the messaging and time. Since I have been at Park we have been through several versions of announcements. The first format was to have the staff that was over the events to do them... that did not work. We have many events that are volunteer driven so scheduling became a nightmare to deal with.

We have done Graphical driven video announcements. And have tried a couple of times with a "host" type delivery video. Continuing to be frustrated with the process I decided to contact a local actress that attends our church to play the role of host for the video, she will do them every week. Here is our first one, I am excited to see how this evolves for us.

Cultivate

So I am feeling uninspired to write any content about anything this week. Maybe it's because I am still recovering from going non stop. Anyway here are some photos form the Cultivate Conference we hosted at Park Community Church. Anthony Barlich of Barlich Photography was the event photographer and did an amazing job, I love his eye.

Fall Set

When I started thinking about what the set was going to be this fall, I had a certain criteria that I wanted to meet.

1 - The set needed to feel like it encompassed the whole stage. We have a 30' section of solid wall in the center of our stage. The sides of the stage is covered in windows 40' in each direction. This creates certain challenges when designing sets. We open the curtains at the end of each service and are sensitive to blocking the view.

2 - I wanted it to be versatile in it's looks. I wanted to be able to go from a polished saturated color look to a raw industrial look.

3 - It needs to be versatile in its location. This set will take us all the way to Christmas so I wanted something that can change from week to week if we want it to.

I knew from the beginning that I wanted 4 towers that would be constructed from steel studs and covered in Coroplast. The exact design of these towers was up in the air until the last minute. The design evolved from having multiple opacities of Coroplast to having a 58" plasma in each one. The structural design changed as well through several generations of drawings.

We landed on the simple cross beam design. This felt simple and elegant, although it was difficult to actually build. So we decided that two sides of the towers would have the cross beam pattern and the other two sides would have a simple horizontal beam pattern. This became the plan until we ran out of time. So the center two towers have 2 sides with the cross beam and 2 sides with the horizontal pattern and the two outside towers only have the horizontal pattern. They ended up being 16' X 4'.

In the end, I do wish they were all the same but they still look great. I am excited to see what we do the next couple months with these. We already have some really cool plans for the upcoming week, so be sure and check back for pictures and videos.