My wife - An Amazing Mom

My wife, Kristen, is an amazing woman! This last weekend, we continued our series at The Orchard called, That's What She Said, where we've been celebrating and learning from some great women.

Mother's day weekend, we chose to do something different from what we've done in quite a long time. We rolled out a red carpet that ran from the curb inside to the auditorium. We dressed one of our guys in a tux (nice job Jason) and had him host the red carpet by cheering and celebrating the moms and women who came to one of the services. We had their pictures being taken on the red carpet and a live audio/video broadcast feed of the red carpet events being projected on the big screen inside the auditorium so the rest of the Orchard community could celebrate too. We had silk flower petals of various color all over the seats and floor in the auditorium. We also had more of a living room feel on our teaching platform where we got to hear from the hearts of four wonderful moms.

Scott interviewed four moms from The Orchard. Each shared about their struggles and triumphs as a mom. It was a great weekend! The last service of the weekend was packed and the ladies received a standing ovation! It was an incredible thing to be a part of.

I say all that to say that my wife is amazing! She is an incredible wife and mom. I know that she was very nervous about speaking in front of such a large group of people but she did not freeze up. She spoke clearly and intelligently.

I'm so very proud of you Kristen - not because of this event but because of the person you are and because you are my wife. I have to say though, I was beaming at the back of the room during every service you spoke!

If you get a chance, you'll want to check out the podcast here.

Creative and Funny

I have to say... I'm hooked on this dude's blog. Very creative, a good writer and his posts are just plain funny. If you have not been over to John's blog and are in need of a laugh, you need to go there.

Now. Go ahead. It's ok if you leave mine to go check out his (just make sure you come back :)

The dude is becoming a blogging fiend too.

If you missed it, here's some videos he wrote scripts for. Pretty simple, pretty clever, and funny.

Let me know what you think.
Peace.

1. Yeah I said Twitter.



2. Bath time.



3. I just learned spanish.

Silence Part 2

If you missed the previous post, check it out here.

I've uploaded the file that we used for our First Wednesday in Silence. We use Keynote as we run everything on Mac at The Orchard so I've uploaded a few options for everyone else:

1. The original keynote (Manksans font, 1280 x 720 screen size, no slide transition but a 2 second dissolve "all at once" build in and out on the text pieces).
2. A manual advance flash file that you can check out in a flash enabled browser to get the idea of the flow and the elements we used. We did the whole presentation manually advancing text so we could gauge the room better.
3. A zipped folder of the slide images. This includes a .jpg image for each part of the build so that if you put each image into a powerpoint or keynote presentation and assigned the dissolve transition to the images you should be ok.

If for some reason you still don't see what you need and would like to check it out for use in a small group or church gathering setting, let me know.

Simple but very powerful.

After you check it out, let me know what you thought of it.
Peace.

My Wife, The Photographer

My wife used to be really into photography when we first started dating 15 years ago. She has kind of given it up since except for pictures of the kids and projects every now and then.

Lately we've been having conversations about her and her photography and I think if she had the right equipment it would help.

So, I'm on a mission to find a good camera for her.

The more we talk about it the more I think she enjoyed the actual developing of the film back then more than she enjoyed taking the pictures, but I think she has a pretty good eye for texture, color and space.

Here are a few pictures she took of me this last week in about 5 minutes outside the mall with our cheesy camera (her idea).

Which do you like the best?
Peace.

Get A Griff!

I've had a lot of people ask about our staging. Over the last 10 months at The Orchard, we've done a lot of set designs with soft goods - fabrics an such.

There are a lot of different soft goods out there that catch and reflect light in different ways (maybe I'll go into that in a future post), but the purpose of this post is to talk about Griff Clips. If you decide to do any kind of staging with oft goods, you will love these things!

I was introduced to these little wonders a few years ago at Willow Creek. These little plastic clips give you the ability to hold, pull, stretch or tie down fabric without putting holes in the material. You can then re-use material over and over in different, creative ways. The concept of the Griff Clip is that the fabric goes between the two pieces, the pieces are then fit together in a way that the more tension is put on the material, the tighter it becomes. It has a loop on one piece (as you can see above) that allows you to tie (I use black cord so it can't be seen as easily) to piping or hooks - whatever.

These clips are inexpensive and definitely something that you creative people out there will want to have on hand. You can get them in bags of 50 from Reef Industries, Inc.

Tell them that I sent you!
Peace.

Set Pics for RTO2

Here's a couple of pics of the set we have up for our summer series Rockin' The Orchard 2.

























What kind of cool set stuff are you all doing where you lead?

Peace.

Fantastic Fourth

My wife already posted about our great day together as a family.
We had a lot of fun together.

I have a wonderful family - more than I could have asked our imagined. My hope is that July 4th, 2007 will be as great of a memory for my kids as it was for me.

I concur with my wife that it was one of the best fireworks displays I've ever seen. It can't get much better than sitting in the middle of a well kept golf course on a blanket with the fireworks exploding right in front of you and even right above you.

I tried to convince my kids that those who were executing the pyrotechnics were creative artists - they choose which part of the sky (canvas) to explode the fireworks, which colors and when. They also work with sound, anticipation, effects and use a combination of those things to draw the participant into what is happening.

I felt a connection for sure as a creative arts guy.
I can't say my kids did.
Hopefully they can block that part of the memory when they recall our time together :)

How was your Independence celebration?

Peace.

Collaborating

Very excited about this Sunday! I was looking for a song that would fit like-a-glove for a message that one of our teaching pastors was teaching this weekend and felt like we needed a song to wrap up the message.

Couldn't find one that really said what I wanted to say.

So, I threw together some ideas I had and started writing one of our own. The most exciting part about the whole thing was taking it to rehearsal and collaborating with my team. Some great ideas came from our session together. While we didn't finish it that night, the ideas we put together fueled the final result and the song came together for Sunday. In my opinion, it is one of the best I've been a part of writing and I believe that's because it was a team effort.

I'm looking forward to hearing how it turns out tomorrow and how it is received.
I'll keep you posted.

Peace.

Moto Photos

Found these under optical illusions but thought they were pretty cool. If you look close at them, you'll see that they are Harley Davidson motorcycle parts placed in a design to form a human face. One of Harley's ad campaigns geared toward custom bikes.

What do you think?
Peace.

Simply Creative

Creative spark: Write down what you are trying to achieve in a sentence.

From Nigel Collins book, Think Bits: Things to Get You Thinking Creatively.

We often have great ideas that are hard to articulate and so the very act of thinking about how to say it all in a sentence makes you really concentrate and clarify your thoughts into being simple and easy to understand.

Film makers and script writers are good at this. To pitch their ideas they need to condense a 90 minute film into a sentence, especially when they're seeking finance from time-poor executives.

By making yourself write down your ideas or concepts in a sentence you are forcing yourself to clarify your thinking.

Now this isn't easy and may take time, but stick with it and it will pay enormous dividends.

Once you can state your purpose in a sentence you'll find it easier to come up with creative ideas relating to that purpose. You'll have a clear directive to give your brain.

By the way, to work well it's best to write a short sentence, not a long one.

Peace.