Big Stuf 2009

Head on over to BenjaminJamesDesign.com to check out the new post of Big Stuf 2009!

BenjaminJamesDesign.com

The first official post is up on Benjaminjamesdesign.com! Check out BigStuf 2010!

http://benjaminjamesdesign.com/2010/10/big-stuf-2010/

2 years?!?

Wow! Has it really been 2.5 years since my last post? That’s pretty ridiculous, but rest assured, there is so much to update you all on! I am working on merging my blog site (this one) and my company portfolio website, and hopefully the result will be worth the wait!

The new address for this will be: http://www.benjaminjamesdesign.com

BIG! Things have happened in my world the past couple of months. First, I got married 3 weeks ago to the love of my life! Danielle and I got married in Peachtree City and went to Cancun (Excellence – Playa Mujeres…would highly recommend it) for our honeymoon!

Second, we moved to Nashville and I took the job as Service Programming Director at a North Point Strategic Partner, Cumberland Church. It has really been a great fit and more inline with my passion and gifts of creating from the 30,000 foot view. I am still designing (although on a smaller scale) as well as managing the production, music and services as a whole. Love it!

I am however still doing a lot of large-scale design for some of my clients, so come back and see some budget designs as well as some high-budget designs. I will be posting some of the work of the past couple of years including: Maximum Impact Simulcast, Passion Conferences, Chick-fil-a LeaderCast, and all of my NPMi work.

Thanks for sticking around!

BJ

Why Worry Set

I have a busy, busy week ahead, so there’s not much time to go into detail, but here are a couple pics of what out set has looked like the past couple weeks. It comes down sunday and is replaced by the Illusions set that I designed for Buckhead Church last year. It feels nice to have a set that you designed but someone else built!

Anatomy of a Set #3

Please forgive me! This has been sitting in my drafts folder for like 4 weeks!

Alright, here is the current set. I have been playing around with this concept for a while (I am usually juggling about 15 different concepts at a time). We had a ton of 2x4x6 foam blocks left over from our ‘Playing God’ set a year and a half ago, most of which were already carved into this wave form for our ‘Judgement Call’ series last october. Continuing with the wave form factor, we layered the blocks on top of each other to for a sort of massive wave design on the xy axis and a semi-circle on the z. We side lit them with Mac 250 washes with wide lenses, so we got some really cool gradients as each side of the wave took a different color.

The other main element was all of the truss work. We used 8 sticks of 12″ box truss on stage, each with a coemar parlite inside for warming. In front of the proscenium, there were (2) 20′ segments that were raked back and towards the center of the stage and the other (2) 20′ segments made up the “v” truss in the center, which served as a major focal point, but had to fly out of the way so that our projector could project the message. Over the audience we had (3) 12’x12′ truss diamonds with chauvet LED pars inside the truss and spandex in the center. A lot of the punch of the warming came from a product that we had used in the past, but recently found a great distributor for – coroplast. It comes in 4×8 sheets, so we simply scored it on one side every foot and bent it around the truss. Very cool look for really cheap.

Check out some pics – let me know if you have any questions!

Bike MS

I’m off to ride the Cox Bike MS 150 tomorrow with my dad. The event is trying to raise $1 million for MS research, and my team (Coca-Cola) is trying for $100,000! It’s a two day event with about 65 miles of riding each day, but I can only do tomorrow since we have church sunday. I hope my quad holds up! I tweaked it a bit while playing softball last night! Pics to come of the current set!

And here we go…

Ok, so you can all stop freaking out and reminding me to blog now – I’m back, at least for tonight. What have you been doing for the last, oh, 4 months, you ask, that I would be away from blogging for so long. The answer is a lot and not much at the same time. It’s definitely been an interesting blend of busyness and recharge as the summer always is, but things seem more on the busyness curve right now. I have a couple things that I am going to try to blog about over the next week or so – mostly set stuff, but I thought I would catch you up on at least may-early august with this post. At church, we decided to go with a rather simple look for a while – you could call it a palette cleanser of sorts, after all the video and punch sets we did earlier in the year. I basically wanted to do something a little more based on my love of modern interior design, but mix in a more organic element as well, so I designed these asymmetrical panels that I painted a full stage vine/floral on. Here are a couple pics of it in action:

They were basically made of 2x2s with coroplast and muslin as the backing/diffusion. It was a bit of a tedious project, as most of mine seem to be, but overall I think it turned out nicely. It definitely set the stage well for the set that we just put up a couple weeks ago (more on that later).

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The other big event that I did earlier this summer was a camp in Panama City called Big Stuf. The theme for the summer was Broadcast, so after a creative meeting with their team and a bunch of other people from our parts I went to the drawing board and came up with 3 or 4 concepts that would work with the theme. From there, Jamie (BS Creative Director) and I sorta hammered out the final design. The idea was for it to be really bright with lots of  saturation and depth. I’ll show some pics first and then explain a bit:

Like I said, we really wanted to have a lot of saturation, so I chose to use (10) Martin Mac 2k Washes and (12) Mac 700 Profile Spots. In addition, we used (93) Chauvet LED Rain 56s, (30) LED Rain 64s, and (52) Chauvet COLORstrip LED bars either on stage or over the audience – a lot of bang for the buck. I had so many fixtures, I completely filled up all 4 universes on the Hog II with Expansion wing that they rented for the summer. The stage had LEDs everywhere – in addition to (13) Samsung 1080p 40″ LCDs on a 40′ truss arch and (12) Samsung 1080p 50″ Plasmas that made up the center plasma wall (Brad Sitton and Brad Weston’s baby).

One of the things that we were really conscious of when designing the room was that we had to engage the whole room and not just create a stage experience (break through the “fourth wall” if you will). We did this by surrounding the screens with truss that was warmed with LEDs so the could turn any color and by hanging (2) 20’x30′ truss rectangles inside the soffets that were covered in spandex material and lit from the inside. We could totally change the whole color of the room from song to song or cue to cue.

It was a huge ordeal to put together in the 3 or 4 days we had to load in for the 10 week camp, but the interns were amazing and it all came together really well. (minus terrible power issues that we ran into – definitely a learning experience for all of us).

So there you go…you are officially caught up to August at least – I will try to post pics of our current set as soon as I get some quality ones.

Hearing

I am watching a documentary on HBO about an elderly couple, both deaf all their lives, who get cochlear implants. I have no idea what it is called because the info says it is Little Miss Sunshine, but I have found myself drawn deep into the story of these people. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to not be able to hear, but even more so, what it must be like to live your whole life without hearing a sound only to suddenly be able to hear everything. The noise that we put so easily into the background is instantly all in the foreground all at the same time to the point where you can’t distinguish which sound you should be hearing. 

I love what the father says when asked what the voice he hears sounds like – he says “I don’t know, how do I describe what green looks like.” There is absolutely no reference. They go home and test everything out. The light switches, rubbing their hands on the walls, their footsteps, tiptoeing down the hall, power tools, fans, car washes – everything that we take for granted they are immediately in tune with and amazed by.

It is also heart-wrenching, the pain that they go through with the frustration of not progressing quickly in being able to distinguish different noises. They usually revert to taking their receivers off to return to the “normalcy” of no sound rather than get used to the new sensations.

The daughter, who is narrating the story, said something that hit me hard…”As I watch my mother struggle with all these new sounds, I realize that part of learning how to hear must be learning how NOT to hear; how to tune in what’s relevant and tune out what you don’t need or what you just don’t want to hear….In the car, mom had already stuffed her $7,000 tool in the compartment next to her chewing gum.”

I realize that my life for the most part is sensory overload. It’s so loud that it is hard to distinguish what God is trying so patiently to speak into my life, that I often just give up and put His tool in the compartment next to the chewing gum. Then I get frustrated that I cannot hear only to realize that I’ve already discarded the only thing that can repair what is, in my case, a deaf heart, and turn it back on, wondering why I had turned it off in the first place. I am wired to be around people all the time – it gives me energy, but it’s so good for me to realize my need for quiet, to remind me to simplify and quiet the noise in my life. 

What do you do to quiet the noise?

Next Set

The next set is being built this week, but doesn’t go in until the first week of June. It’s much more simple than the last two have been, but still has loads of saturation, texture and depth. I will probably post more about the process this time around rather than just the final product. 

Cool Gimick…

Check out how Sony is choosing to advertise their new environmentally friendly attitude.

read more about it here…

http://www.advertolog.com/paedia/prints/2008/5/6/200426/