Back in the Saddle

after some awfully cold weather for this time of year and a couple days off the bike, it feels good to have a sunny day to go riding on! Get out and do something, seriously, it’s gorgeous!

 

Everyone’s a critic

I promise I am not going into blog-hibernation again…but I do have a question I would love for anyone and everyone to chime in on. 

I went to Passion this past weekend, and absolutely loved it…amazing time to worship corporately and refocus my mind on the cross. Here’s the question: Is it impossible once we enter production-world to go to an event and not critique every little bit of it?

Comment it up!

Out of gas…

So, I’m an idiot and decided that it would be a good idea to drive from my house to downtown atlanta and back then repeat the journey all while my gas meter was squarely (or under) E. Well, sure enough, when I was about half a mile from the gas station, my car cut out. Thankfully, I had just left the Living Room (Buckhead’s college group that I help out with) and my friend Ben was amazing and brought me some gas. I won’t be trying that again anytime soon! Thanks for rockin’ Ben!

The Anatomy of a Set #2

So here we are again – a new month, a new set. The concept stage began the end of february/first week of march with several concept drawings which I took into my concept meeting with our production director Chris. Some of them are complete thoughts and others are more bits of ideas that have been floating around in my head for a while. These meetings are usually really cool because I tend to be more abstract while Chris tends towards concrete, so usually I can come in with and idea and Chris will have an amazing way of implementing it. 

Here’s what we left with (4) weeks out:

 

For the most part, I didn’t want to do anything with aspect ratio video for a while, so I wanted to do something with a versa-tube look and was really inspired by the form-factor of Coldplay’s XY cd. Obviously this much versa-tube (250 tubes) would cost upwards of $60,000 and could cost as much as $20,000-$30,000 just to RENT for the 9 weeks that we want to have this set up for (a couple one-offs, a short series and a long Buckhead capture series), so we turned to an idea that we used for our set last easter and decided to use projection for these panels instead. The object on which we would project? What’s round, white and about 2″ in diameter – that’s right – PVC…1,000 linear feet of it. As you can see from the above sketch, we built 4′x4′ frames, painted them black, and screwed 8 PVC tubes to each frame (it’s funny that this one sentence in actuality took almost 2 full work days to complete). I wanted to build them modular for a couple reasons.

1. We could change the design if we needed to really easily simply by moving squares around

2. We could have more people working on more projects at the same time and have more of an assembly line set up

3. I had no idea how we were going to get it all in the air if we built the whole structure on the ground first

Once we got everything built, the panels went together rather quickly, but this was an incredibly long process. 

The other big piece of this design puzzle was the American Idolesque towers that line our proscenium and sit dead center in the camera 1/2 shot. Honestly, I had no idea how we were going to build these and it would have taken us forever, but God definitely knows what He is doing and one of my volunteers, Mickey, has a guy who does high-spec welding for gasoline tankers. I drew up some specs and sent them his way and the welders pulled it off to perfection! We started talking to them about it on last wednesday, had specs to them on thursday, they had materials monday, welded it tuesday and delivered it wednesday…amazing! The columns are made out of 1/4″ aluminum and lined with velum paper. I lit each of the columns with 3 Coemar ParLite LEDs and lit the wall behind the column instead of the actual column so that the column would light evenly without any hotspots. I did the same thing with the center, but use left over foam that we had used for a previous set as the reflector.

We also planned on doing a lighting change, but thankfully, we decided to push it back to this coming week to save our team from killing themselves with another 20 hours of work. I’ll post more pictures when we are done with that.

The video portion of the set is done with (2) Christie S9 projectors with .8 lenses controlled by PVP at front of house. We are using (2) mac minis as slave nodes so that we can have one image stretched across both screens instead of the same image repeated on both panels. The secret is using high contrast loops.

Here are some photos that Tyler snapped quickly this morning:

 

 

Whew…that was a brain workout. I hope you enjoy! What do you think?

I’m Back

Hello Blogworld! I’m back and I can’t apologize enough for my absence! Things have been crazy in my world with 3 or 4 rather large projects going on at one time. We just finished setbuild week at the Double B and I am so freakin excited about this set. I am waiting till I get a couple quality pics before I blog about it, but it’s done. This one was definitely one of the hardest sets to 1. plan for, 2. get all the materials for, and 3. build, but we did it, and on time! One thing that definitely helped was pushing out lighting week to next week, so we did not change the movers setup (it works fine) and it provided us much more margin because honestly, we would still be building on Sunday if we had tried to do lighting this week as well. Have you missed me?

Anything Going on in your world?

 

New set…

…coming soon! I have been unbelievably busy, sorry for the lack of posts!

This is for shove…

http://moustacheme.com/

In honor of Shove’s poll question…get on over there and vote for your favorite look.

New Browns Bridge Production Site

We started up a blogging site for BBCC production…check it out  

http://bbccproduction.wordpress.com

John Mark McMillan

Here’s the story of that song:

How He Loves Us

This song has been owning me lately: I absolutely love the imagery in the verses…Loves like a hurricane, I am a tree bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy…Heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss…man, how that stirs up my heart and I love the hugeness of the chorus. Oh how he loves us! (it comes around 3:05 into the first video).