Piper|Carson Event

Last week the Gospel Collation held their annual conference just outside Chicago. For the last evening of the conference everyone was invited to join John Piper and Don Carson at Park Community Church for a discussion titled "the Pastor as a Scholar, and the Scholar as a Pastor".

Due to the fact that we were just hosting the event we had to put the sponsors logos on the stage behind the speakers so that they were visible on the video. I used our three screen setup from our christmas set except this time I lined up 3 58" plasmas and used them to display the logos. I moved the computer for the three screens on stage right behind the plasmas, we then covered it with black fabric. Our video room is on the second floor so this kept us from having to add two additional cable runs. I often use remote desktop to control computers so it worked out great.

I added 6 columns three on each side of the stage. I used Coroplast left over from easter. I scored the 4 X 8 sheets every foot and folded into a square then taped the connection corner with white gaff tape. I then cut a slot in the bottom for the cables and placed them over our LED par cans.

This event maxed our our facility, It was fun to see the building overflowing with people. We set up every classroom and public area as overflow and they were all full.

Remember

For Good Friday this year we did a short theater piece where a man beat a cross on stage. While he was beating the cross a figure representing Jesus was hanging from a rope on the other side of the stage responding to every blow. During this scene a sin would flash on the wall with every hit.

For Easter Sunday, we took one of the crosses he beat on stage and hung it in a stair case that connects our two main lobbies. The Good Friday theater piece was very moving for a lot of people and they are reminded of the sacrifice that Jesus made for us every time they enter the building.

Got to love it!

Late last August my wife went to visit her parents. I took the opportunity to go see The Dark Knight. I first went to Navy Pier to see it at IMAX but it was sold out. I took a bus to the next closest theater. After the movie I started walking to the L station. It was one of those amazing summer evenings and after seeing Chicago in the Dark Knight it was an amazing feeling to walk down those streets.

On my way home I saw a shoot happening on lower Michigan Ave. I wandered down that way and snapped a couple of pics on my phone. They had wrapped for the night and the cast was leaving when I got there. I often wondered what they were shooting. There was a CTA bus down there so I thought it may have been an ad for CTA.

Today I was sitting in Joseph's office and we were listening to The Fray's 'You found me'. We were talking about the video so he pulled it up on You Tube. I saw them on the bridge and knew what it was. I had been there and seen the set up.

I love living in the city. I love the crazy things you stumble upon.

They shot this on top of 311 Wacker. It is the building Jazz, my 6 year old, can see out of his window and judges whether it's bedtime by whether the light is on or off.

Easter

Easter at park was fairly low key short service. We did 4 services at our main campus and one at our Lincoln Park Campus.

I used 4X8 sheets of white coroplast hung by black chain to create the reflective surface for the center projector. I also treated the entire room with a breakup pattern in an amber color.

We also did baptism as part of our easter service we have always done it at the lake during the summer and baptize a large number of people. We have started doing them in small numbers. I was against each person sharing their testimony but in the end think we should always do small numbers so they can share. This became a real family moment and people connected on an emotional level to each of the people being baptized.

Good Friday

The set for Good Friday had to provide space for the band to play and for a short theater piece. The band was small keys, electric, drums, acoustic, and violin. The theater piece consisted of a cross that we created out of metal studs that would be beaten with a metal pipe and a rope with a hook on the end for a Jesus character to hang on.

I wanted to create a oppressive feel in the room. The ceiling of bulbs above the band made the space feel small and closed in. This was done with sockets from IKEA and 90w par 38 spot bulbs. I rented 4 MAC 700 wash and 4 MAC 700 profile fixtures.

As the cross was being beaten we flashed sins with our center projector on the wall above the ceiling of bulbs.

It was cool how the cords for the bulbs became a piece of art when his from the sides with a rotating pattern.

Editing

We shot a promo for program called Alpha the other day.
The actress, Kirby O'Connell, that came in to do the promo was fighting a cold at the time. After we shot the footage we noticed there was a "glisten" in her right nostril in some of the shots. It was very noticeable in three of the shots. we were short on time to get it turned around for the weekend. I spent a couple of hours Saturday tracking the "glisten" and applying a circle blur to remove it.

This is the unedited promo

This is the motion tracking for the circle blur

This is the final edit of the promo.

Cool Image

So we really have not been doing a lot of cool stuff lately but just the basics while getting ready for Good Friday and Easter. I did want to post this image because I thought it was just very cool. She was singing about being sheltered under the wing of God.

O what a tangled web

We have branded the next part of 1st Corinthians "O what a tangled web". We immediately knew we wanted a Tim Burton (ish) look. I designed the artwork. After several fonts, we decided on the one. I asked Chris Joye to compose a short score for the project. His piece was amazing. It was a perfect fit.

I had designed 20' diameter spiderwebs to flank our stage and hang above the house. We ran into some scheduling issues - this part is not 4 weeks like we thought but 6 weeks. It will span Easter and we have a wedding right after Easter. Spider webs for a wedding would not go over well. I decided to make 10', easily movable, webs. We put one together and it looked horrible. I scraped the idea at the last minute. It's called creativity. I guess we'll just have to stick to projection-based elements.

When it came to the video I knew we would do a 3D thing and fly the artwork in and webs were going to be part of the visuals. I really was struggling with what would tie the whole thing together. A couple of weeks ago, I got the idea to make the webs out of words, words describing the things that cause the webs.

I hate coming up with ideas like that when I have no idea how I am going to make it happen. I started doing tests to make sure it was possible with the software I have. It was a lot because to be able to zoom as far in as I needed to, the files had to be huge. It really slowed down the processes. I needed a couple more gigs of ram. I made several attempts at including the wall paper, changing the wall paper, and trying to create a room out of the wall paper. After several failed attempts and much frustration I just let the background be black and flew in the wallpaper at the end.

Preview

So we have changed the set this week more for fun than anythings else. Joseph's band debuts this week so I thought it would be fun to do something different. I wanted a rougher small stage look so I scoured Chicago land Goodwill stores and got a bunch of great lamps for really cheap. I then put 4 sc40 pipes in some bases we had and put 3 source 4 pars with 575w lamps on each pipe. I left the random lenses in the top 8 in the bottom 4 we put a very narrow lens and pointed them up at the ceiling. the top 8 fixtures are focused at the band. The lamps are on 6 different channels so we can do a random chase and have a really cool look. Not really sure what imagery is going on the big screen in the center or the side screens... I know it's Friday but I'm sure inspiration will come soon.

Theatrical

So we went with a theatrical look at Park today. After a lot of changes at the last minute due to several key players being sick the music changed at the very last minute, Saturday at 1:30. The "band" ended up being a single voice with piano. We had a single look for all the music.

I created this by overlaying a gilded frame over an image of burgundy drapes and adding some lighting effects in photo shop. I then washed the curtains in red to match.

Park usually has more of a raw urban feel so the classier look was very different for us.

Maps

Our lead pastor, Jackson Crum, uses a lot of historical references during his teaching. He often shows you temples, ruins, statues, and maps. As you can imagine the quality of most biblical maps leaves a lot to be desired.

I was watching CNN one day and saw them use Google maps. I was hooked, what a relevant way to show people what happened. The first map that I did I was amazed at the terrain. When I imagine Paul on his journeys I did not thinks about how rough the terrain was that he had to overcome. It brought it home to me in a whole new way. This file is Paul's 4th Journey. 

I purchased the Google Earth application so that it gives me the ability to export to what ever codec that I need. I export to HD720 and it plays flawlessly. The program is somewhat challenging because it really is not a "production" type of package so you have limited control over time and speed. I will often bring the file into Final Cut Pro and speed it up, or pause it at a location for an extended amount of time.

The reaction from our people has been overwhelming they really love it. During our Three Screen setup I created one that spanned the screens, you almost needed Dramamine because of the motion sickness effect it had. For that one I exported the clip at 1080p so I had the most pixels to work with.

Reduce, reuse, recycle, and impress!

Ok so we all know the economy suck. So in an effort to be good stewards and wise spenders I am trying to be creative with what we have laying around.

I was really tired of the three screen setup. I was having to create two versions of everything it was really getting old. So last week we split the screen apart, we put the two screens back on the sides of the stage. I put the wide angle lens in the center projector and put aluminum screen, that was left over from our first set, at different angles from the bottom of the cat walk. This created a 20 X 30 foot image that is fragmented and creates some double imagery at points. The overall effect was very dramatic.

We launched the common.org for our church today. Benjamin Gott, the founder of the common, was there to help us launch it.

Relationship Status is our current series the backdrop added a dramatic visual aspect to the artwork.

The great thing about this set is that you can use traditional elements in a contemporary context.

Love the tree.

Relationship Status

So we are going through 1st Corinthians. We are hitting the relationship part in February. We have branded this section Relationship Status, This is a preview for the series. Week one is dealing with sexual immorality, week two is Singles, week three is marriage, and week 4 is divorce.  The last couple of series have had complicated art so we decided to make this one really simple to keep things mixed up. This is a very different look for us so it will be fun to hear people's response. 

I love seeing this on my blog

I love seeing this IP address on my blog.

We Shall Overcome

This was another element in our Martin Luther King Jr service. This is a live recording of Michelle singing. This was not a planned element it was a spontaneous creative moment during rehearsal Sunday morning, I went to my office and put the footage together. It truly was a special moment Michelle stood center stage backlit only, it was powerful.

Martin Luther King Jr - The Process

Martin Luther King Tribute from Jason Widney on Vimeo.

Martin Luther King Jr weekend at church... what does that really mean. In the past 15 years of being on staff at churches not much. 

Park's new building is in the middle of a very diverse neighborhood in Chicago. The area is being reshaped and redefined and everyone in the area is struggling on what a diverse neighborhood looks like.

As Park focuses on racial reconciliation this Sunday I have struggled to put together a video that merges the two worlds of the past and the present and represents authentically the struggle. Your mind goes to the classic MLK tribute of  inspiring music and hearing the I have a dream speech while seeing the classic MLK photos with I have a dream in glowing letters scrolling by. I knew that was not what I wanted to make I sat down with Curt, our music and band developer and showed him this and this. I felt this was fresh inside perspective on the whole situation, this was the lens that people who were in the midst of it used to express themselves.

He came back with using rage against the machine's wake up as a back drop to express the aggressiveness that was surrounding Martin luther King. This contrast MLK's peaceful approach, but echos what the country was feeling. 

We recorded scratch tracks to edit to, I will blog about the creation of the click tracks in the near future, the band did an amazing job. We did a board recording Sunday afternoon and Michelle came in after our evening service and laid down her vocals. With the three screen setup still in place we were able to create a very impactive experience. The image is 47' X 9'. I shot the interviews in Chicago's downtown loop. the point of the interviews was to show how MLK influenced the average African American and how little it means to the average caucasian. We know this seams to stereotype people but for the most part I found this to be true with the people I interviewed. 

The video ended with a modified version of our unhindered bump. 

Unhindered Shoot photos

I snapped these picture of the Ink shoot for our Unhindered series.

3 Screen Setup

For the Winter set we decided to to a three screen set up as the center piece of our stage. We run ProPresenter software as our lyrics and video play back solution so all we had to add was the module package and the Matrox TripleHead2Go box. We already had the projectors and screens and each projector had a individual cable runs.

I set up my sequence in Final Cut Pro to 2400 X 600 and Shot all the footage in HDV720p. It is a challenge to think about editing this way when you are shooting I put some guide lines on my LCD viewfinder to help out.

Unhindered

So for the month of January we are doing vision messages. Our lead pastor came up with the title Unhindered. I had a hard time coming up with imagery to go with the title. The first things that came to mind was a person in a field with their arms raised (ok I know very cheesy) the next was someone dancing crazy. I knew neither of those were good options. On our drive back to Oklahoma I came up with the ink concept I called Tim he loved the Idea so I spent the next couple of days thinking about how to make it happen.

I picked up a $12 fish tank at the local pet store and some fabric dye at the art store. I set up a soft box behind the fish tank and shot straight into the tank. let the water settle and and squirted in the dye. I then took some white paper and and shot the ink drops.

s l o w

The last three weeks were insane. I have always wanted to not do one big production for christmas but split it up over the first three weekends. Sounds really cool in theory but it is a lot of work. Usually I have one big week where you work non stop to do a set and production and life goes back to normal. Well this has been a non stop 3 week period. The set was insane to get in place. My computer crashed and I lost a lot of work. And it was finals week so most of my volunteers had crazy schedules and could not be here a lot. 

All of that to say I am taking it slow this week. This Sunday is scaled back but still very cool. I am spending time with the family again. And getting ready to head back to Tulsa for a week over Christmas.