Little or no budget? Innovate.

Love stuff like this.  With everyone it seems experiencing cutbacks in budgets, including creative media budgets, it pushes us to a couple of options.  One option is to sit back, and say what we can’t do.  The other is to ask “what can we do?”.  Innovation is often limited by leadership that is 1. focused on what we can’t do and 2. doesn’t give permission to experiment and fail.  I love what Craig Groeschel says about LifeChurch and their culture: “Failure isn’t just expected, it’s required.”  Here’s a church that built a very cool LED-esque wall with existing equipment and $1000.  Check it out:

outdoor projection

Thanks Ken for the heads up on this.  Love how they utilize projection on a building (check it out here).  Thinking through applications for message series, advertising, etc.  If you have a structure in an area with a decent amount of traffic, what a great use of space.

Some recent work

Don’t think I’ve posted this yet.  It’s a bumper I did for Pine Ridge Church a month or so ago.  Check it:

http://www.vimeo.com/7038606

130 Million Dollars: Something Feels Wrong

I was reading over on Monday Morning Insight and they were discussing in one of their blog posts First Baptist Church of Dallas’ campaign to raise 130 Million Dollars to build a new complex in downtown Dallas.  FBC Dallas has an information page that has an extensive video collection which covers their history, and gives an explanation of the project.  You can tell they spent some serious change on these videos.  Take a minute to check the videos out when you can.  As I was watching the videos, I was just flooded with several thoughts on this.  Here are mine, would love to hear yours.

• I’ve got to admit, while watching it, I felt like I was watching something from Disney.  Very well, done mind you.  I don’t know if you’ve seen any reruns of the wonderful world of disney from the 60’s where Walt Disney is describing the layout of disney world before it was constructed.  Kinda felt like that.
• 130 million is alot of dough.  Yeah, I have a problem with that.  I understand that construction costs in the US are what they are.  I just think that there are way better solutions than that.
• How many of the families that come to FBC Dallas are driving into the downtown area for church.  You could take half of that, and fully fund 3 to 4 multi site campuses all over the city and suburbs, including full time staff.
• The project is based on a broken paradigm.  It is the “come and see” vs the “take the church” to where the people are.
• Is this about building the Kingdom or preserving our historical and geographical heritage in downtown Dallas?
• I’m sure that there are people from their pastor to the leadership that have wrestled with some of those questions.  I don’t doubt their sincerity to reach people for Christ.  Just think their methodology here is busted.
• I’m sitting here today editing a video of one of our folks who is just broken and blown away over seeing the FIRST converts in a previously unreached people group in a language where not even the whole Bible is translated as of yet, and I’m thinking to myself “What if we took just half of that 130 million and used it to reach more unreached people?
• Those arguments could be made about a lot of things that we spend our money on, and there are people on both sides that have legitimate points.  I mean, I’ve stood in some incredible cathedrals and was led to worship just from the architecture.  Just incredible.  Would love to hear your thoughts on your reaction to the videos.

U2 on YouTube…in case you missed it

Here’s the video of the U2 Concert on YouTube.  Couple of hours long so you may want to pull up a chair…or sofa

thank you U2…and You Tube

Just an incredible online experience and exceptional quality.  If this was a beta test for anything, I would say it was a home run.  Of course, the fact that they are one of my favorite bands helped the experience.  On the technical side, I was VERY impressed. I watched the whole experience from my DSL connection at my house, was great video quality even at full screen and it buffered on my computer…once….that’s almost unheard of.  Few screenshots.  Click on any to enlarge.

Be The Church Photo Montage

Here’s the photo/video montage that we showed this morning at the Banks Mill and West Campuses.  It was a part of the Be The Church celebrations.

a little fun

love this video.  fresh.

ccc baptism video

This summer we broke up our baptisms into three different times.  This was intentional in the hopes of making it less of a baptismal service and more of a baptism party.  I had planned to get some interviews with some of the baptizees before but was having some mic issues.  Next time.  Just never gets old seeing people going public with their faith.  Teared up seeing all of them, but I about lost it when I saw Logan being baptized.  His baptism is at about 1:05.  You can watch some of Logan’s story on an earlier video on the blog.  The guy helping Phillip baptize is the “Mr. Chuck” from that earlier video.  Good times.

http://www.vimeo.com/6629632

Pine Ridge Church Bumper

wow, I have been such a blogging slacker lately.  I apologize.  I think i have been working on more projects over the last few months than I have in quite a while.  Looking forward to a little break.  Here’s a bumper I created for Pine Ridge Church in Graham, NC.  I designed the sermon series artwork and then provided them with this bumper, promos and a countdown.

http://www.vimeo.com/6612895