Production Musings

April ’09, The Vineyard Series Stage

// April 24th, 2009 // 6 Comments » // Stage Design

The Team:
Crystal George, Art        Laura Eagle, Art
Randy Redmond, Pipe Bending       Sawyer Scott, Pipe Bending/Design
Sue Scott, Pipe Bending/Design        Scott Breiholz, Trellis Work
Todd Foster, Design/Stage Hand        Colin Harman, Design/Stage Hand
Andrew Hunt, Design/Stage Hand

It’s going on five months since we’ve been using the extra big stage riser and it looks like it has 7 weeks left through this next series.  We will miss you, you big, giant, trusty stage riser.  You treated us well.  Actually, the neat part is the cost of this whole thing.  The initial build took about 5 days and cost $1160.  We’ll be getting about 6 months of use out of it….at an estimated $192 per series (assuming a 4 week series).  It was also constructed so that about 95% of it will be recycled into our housing repair ministry.

The challenge within each series this year has been how to incorporate the riser in a new fresh way that ties into the series.  As Colin, Todd and I brainstormed ideas going into The Vineyard series, we all settled into using a mixture of flourish/vine art and soft goods.  Laura and Crystal hand drew each vine onto the spandex and then colored them in.  Sawyer and Sue made the side structures come to life.  Each structure is supported by three main vertical 1.5″ pipes and 5 hand bent (Thanks to the help of their good friend, Randy Redmond) 3/4″ pipes.  Diameter = 5′ and their radius expands just slightly past 180º so they look more circular rather than half round from the front.  Pipe couplers were used to expand the total height to 15′ and were bolted at each vertical pipe.  We stretched spandex around each structure, covered the tops with black plastic (the technical would be “Giant Garbage Bags”) and lit each from the bottom used AC Lighting’s LED Color Splits.  (I’m a big fan of these LED fixtures, BTW.  They’ve been rock solid.)

Scott’s trellis design worked very well in front the vine art.  We back lit this w/ 4 Par 64s using Rosco Light Tough Spun diffuser and Storaro Yellow.  Here’s a few shots.  For more, check out my Flickr.

Lover of Typeface

// April 16th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Thoughts

FINALLY!  Colin has a blog….and you should know about it.  He’s a lover of color, lover of typeface (exceptions: Comic Sans, Papyrus, CurlsMT, and probably also Viner Hand ITC), and generally the guy who keeps pushing me to be better.  His heart is for God, for people, and being ingeniously creative in every day life.  I introduce to you, Colin Harman:

AE Scripts – I love ‘em

// April 15th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Thoughts

It’s been too long since my last post.  We’ve been up to our neck over the past 3 or 4 weeks in video projects and the usual tasks.  I have much to get caught up on.  Until then, here’s the most recent project.  First, a note about After Effects scripts.  Up until this past month I’d never used them.  Uhm, hello?!  They make life easier.  We found one to help us with subtitles (which I’ll write more about later) and another to align objects to a grid.

For Easter, we were expecting above average attendance.  One of the things we wanted to communicate is the life that Jesus offers to all of us and the reality of that.  We wanted to share stories of people whose lives have been changed by Jesus since they’ve chosen to follow Him.  One of the elements we used to help support this message was a mixed media element.  The band performed Matthew West’s song “The Motions” to an animation we created.  It contained photographs from all of the baptisms from 2006-2009.  The question was, “How can we display this in an interesting, attractive manner and be impacting?”  Judson Lee created the performance click track on the Left and some synth/filler on the Right to be mixed in at front of house.

Of the hundreds of photos, we selected the top 80, cropped to 16×9 and resized to 800×450.  We ran the Layers2Grid script found at aescripts.com and it worked like a charm.  After wasting about 7 hours figuring out why nesting one comp into another creates blurry photos, I finally got it right.  Here’s what we came up with:

Ok ok, I apologize for the Mac look rip-off in advance…I couldn’t resist.  Here’s a version with no click, piano only.  I can’t post it with “The Motions” due to synchronization rights: