Food, Creativity, and Technology

Over the years I have always been amazed at how many creative/tech people I have run across that also love using their creativity in preparing food. When I watch Oprah shows that talk about overweight people eating to cope with some deep emotional scar I’m always thinking that’s not me. I just love to eat good rich food! I love butter and cream and gravy and butter and meat and…

Screw the process

Not long after we moved to Chicago, we got a call that my Grandmother, age 74 at the time, had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. Her and my Grandfather had decided not to treat it. So began the inevitable process of saying good bye. We made several trips back to Tulsa to visit her over the following 2 years. Every time we were there, she seemed to…

What’s moving me.

Yesterday I posted about The Autumn Film. They double as Page CXVI, a project that’s vision is to make Hymns accessible and known again. The first time I heard the track Joy I was very moved. It’s not what you think when you click on the track, it takes bit to figure out where they are going with it. By the end you are moved. I have always believed: That…

What’s inspiring me.

I downloaded the latest album, The Ship and The Sea, from the band The Autumn Film last week. This music is creative food for me right now. The lead vocal is haunting, clear, and emotional. The arrangements are fresh and classic at the same time. The lyrics thought provoking. Download the album here.

Pursue | Connect | Invest

As a church, we launched the initiatives to help people engage in the long term spiritual growth plan that we put together. We called it Pursue-Connect-Invest. Pursue Take the next step in. Make the move, take the initiative. Pursuing means you’re taking ownership for your spiritual growth and making steps forward on your spiritual journey. Connect Get plugged in. Connecting means you’re doing your spiritual journey in community. Whether you’re…

[IN]VEST | MEDIA

For the Invest series, I wanted the media to look and sound different. I wanted to tell stories in a different way. This proved harder to coordinate than I initially thought. I came up with the concept of just showing peoples lives instead of having them do a talking head testimony. We would send out a camera man and he would just document a day in the life of. Then…

[IN]VEST | stage

We launched a capital campaign in March. Tim Schraeder, Park’s communications director, blogged about the communications side of it here. I had not planned a set change for the series as it backed up to our Good Friday and Easter services, but.. I was walking thru the gift shop at the Museum of Contemporary Art and saw a mobile that you could clip your photos on and inspiration hit. I…

Resonance

When it came to defining the sound to our Good Friday service, we were inspired by one of the musicians in our church. Christian Larson had recently stepped up and started serving in one of your bands. While driving to work one day, I saw a dance in my head to go along with one of his songs. The story was about something beautiful and pure being destroyed and torn….

7 Sayings of the Cross

We decided to use the seven sayings of the cross as the framework for our Good Friday service this year. I had the idea to have a local poet, John Shirk, take them and re-write them poetically. I had an actor friend of mine, John Dowd, do the videos. I shot the videos with a ring light in a tiny room. It was the most intimate video shoot I have…


Make the most with what you have

Posted 15 Feb 2010 in Art,Stage Design,Video

“Make the most with what you have” has been my motto for the last 16 years. Some would argue that I have ‘a lot’. I often hear people talk about what they don’t have, and what they could do if they had more. I have found that ’a lot’ is relative. Regardless of how much you have, there is always someone who has a lot more than you do that you look to for ideas. Or, something you would do if you had a lot more – time, money, resources, etc.

Last week I did a video shoot for a local private school. At Park, we don’t have a mobile lighting kit. We shoot 90% of our videos on our stage and use the stage lighting to pull it off. We have one 36” x 36” soft box and that is it.

To pull off this video shoot, we grabbed the soft box, 2 Source4 par cans; one with a wide lens and one with a narrow lens. We also took 2 LED par cans. The school has a strong art emphasis, so I gathered some of the students’ art work and drug a couch in from the lobby. We needed to break up the light that was shining on the artwork so I rounded up a cart and a dolly and used them to create the shadows. That part of the school building is under construction with construction dust everywhere. The floor was covered in a layer of dust that, in the end, diffused all the shadows and made them soft. The shoot came out looking great even though we did not have all the proper equipment to make it happen.  Make the most with what you have.

Posted by jasonwidney


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