A Fresh Coat of Pixels

Went to work on updating some of our old promotional material today.

New look for some recurring events

Applying the look to the Baby Dedication announcement

Upgrade to our Haiti trip promo

Old Consignment Sale slide

Revised version

I will now take a break from anything having to do with the colors blue and/or pink for the next 48 hours…

Post-It Sketches and The Message of Impermanence

Animator Don Hertzfeldt is a pretty cheeky and subversive guy. (You’ve seen this, haven’t you?)

I recall one time where he put a comic in this slick anthology called Flight  that was made entirely of Post-It notes. It struck me: that’s a great medium. Just looking at it, you know that it’s intended to store a quickly-scrawled idea for a short time, then be discarded once you flesh it out somewhere else. To keep it around and show it off? That’s a little subversive. It’s cool to buck the natural order and keep them around.

I’ve been trying some quick sketches on a pad in my office lately, and I like the practice. This would be a great format to do a project with, someday.

Can you spot the disguised tangent in the cowboy picture?

A Logo For The Disc Golfers

People in The Woodlands have a passion for disc golfing. It’s unreal. I myself don’t excel at it, but it’s amazing to see how many dudes here go out and bond over hurling plastic circles into the woods. It’s like a civilized, conversation-oriented version of the discus. Or a less-sweaty Ultimate Frisbee.

So naturally, our church has a disc golf course.

Logo idea for our disc golf course, done on my tablet with Adobe Ideas

Completed logo: combination of line drawing and Photoshop

The logo idea was my boss’s; the execution is mine. But our real brainchild is David Wittenmyer, who both built the course and designed the website for it. Go admire his handiwork.

Pages in Progress

Still hacking away at a big ‘ol comics project! Here’re some rough drafts (blue first, then pencil scribble).

(More about what this is here and here).

If you’re interested in seeing more pages, Chapter 1 is up on my Google Plus page. Come check it out!

Modern Blackmail

Causing An Effect

One last thing about Christmas at our church:

We had to build a little town of Bethlehem.

Plans for a full-scale Bethlehem mockup

That’s right. The senior staff decided to build a Styrofoam replica of Bethlehem in the middle of our church lobby. It wasn’t just meant to be an exercise in nativities. Besides just looking cool– and tying into our “Bethlehem Effect” holiday logo– it was also meant to be a display for our holiday giving campaign, which we cleverly dubbed “Cause An Effect.”

“Cause An Effect” was designed to offer multiple giving opportunities. That way, our congregants could decide for themselves which project they felt most strongly about and then contribute accordingly. Our three options included:

-Funding the building of school facilities for orphans in Zambia

-Buying  nursery and program supplies for an inner-city Houston church

-And providing the homeless and impoverished in our community opportunities to stay in a shelter and get a good meal.

The first option, Aid to Zambia, came with a logo all ready to go. That’s because a group of folks from our church had already been working to raise money for the orphans since the fall, doing fundraising and hosting a charity golf tourney. We were excited to bring even more attention to an already worthy cause.

(Logo provided pro bono by adWhite, an advertising and graphics agency in The Woodlands)

After we adopted their program as one of our holiday giving priorities, we decided to design the other two options so that they’d match the A to Z logo.

Thus, for our partnership with the inner-city Houston church, dubbed “Hope for Houston,” we created this image by using a rights-free picture of the Houston skyline, plus some Illustrator trickery:

“Hope for the Homeless” was a little trickier. I kept trying to draw pictures of guys wearing ratty beanies with nappy beards looking pitiful. That was a little overt.  Then, I had a revelation. I grabbed the camera phone:

And BAM: hands outstretched, looking like a heart. That quickly became this logo:

And we had our three options designed and ready to go. All that was left was to tie it back into our “Bethlehem Effect” theme. I did that by designing a parent logo from the “Bethlehem Effect” fonts, adding three multi-colored ripples at the suggestion of my friend, David (to show the ripple effect of being generous).

Now we needed to create a set of banners for the program that would hang behind our scale mockup of Bethlehem, acting as the “sky” part of the setup.

After sending the banners off to be ordered, we got our Styrofoam and some electrically heated knives, carved and painted our town, printed up our brochures, and the little display of Bethlehem was born:

And here’s a closer view:

This is the beauty of the job. You start with a logo idea; you end up with a giving campaign housed in an artificial foam city. I love the journey of creativity that my staff is willing to take. Small starts definitely lead to big effects around here.

The Bumper That Nearly Ate Us Alive

Behold, the place of our doom:

Okay, that’s not totally true. It’s just a diorama. And it didn’t exactly cause anything near death… just a few extra hours at work. So it wasn’t too bad.

But it’s one of the souvenirs of our massive video-production crunch week.

Our plans for the church Christmas video involved a little live-action (which we had experience with) and a lot of computer-aided animation (which was a little less of a familiar prospect).  The live action part, bookending the video, was supposed to show a little girl building a nativity scene… so we went ahead and made the prop you see above, complete with a removable lid. Vince Mims, our media director, was able to easily take it and shoot the live-action part in a single afternoon.

Then it was off to the harder stuff. I’ve told you that Vince is a video wizard. That applies on all sides of the camera. For this video, he planned on using Adobe After Effects to take static drawings and turn them into animated characters. This is a pretty time-consuming process, and we felt a good amount of pressure to get it right.

Vince started by literally replicating the diorama as a 3D world inside the computer. This way, he’d be able to get any camera shot he wanted.

Image courtesy of Vince's Facebook page

As Vince worked on the 3D setup, I worked to draw all the characters we’d be seeing. At first, I only focused on the parts of the characters that we’d see in the shots, like faces and such. Vince then explained that we needed full-body images so he could pull off some sweet pans and zooms. That led to the figures below:

Manger pieces to be assembled in After Effects

This crowd was actually done as three seperate, movable layers, then composited together in Photoshop

Drawing is one thing; digitally coloring is another. All told, I drew nearly 30 images and then dropped in color and shading. This took a couple of extra nights at work… totally worth it.

And once I got the characters finished, Vince began dropping them into the video and setting up the virtual shots.

After that, it was all Vince putting in his virtual magic. The man worked all week on it, then pulled an all-nighter on Friday to finish. And then he did a tech rehearsal on Saturday morning and ran the production on Sunday. He doesn’t quit, folks.

Behold, then, the fruits of our labor. The bumper plays at the beginning, followed by Steve Bradley’s sermon:

Of course, we weren’t done going all-out. Not yet. After we finished the video, it was time to build yet another little town of Bethlehem– one that could go in our foyer.

And it’s a big foyer.

Next: A Display Of  Our Affections

Storyboards 3: “The Bethlehem Effect” Bumper

From the beginning of our holiday planning, our church staff was talking about making a super-special Christmas video (called a “bumper”) to start our sermons. We were already trying to promote a semi-magical, storybook theme for all of our holiday messaging. So how did that translate into a minute-and-a-half video?

The conversation quickly turned toward animation.

Video wizard Vince and I talked about some initial ideas with our pastor, Steve. They had already picked out some music that they thought captured the feel of the holiday, so we built a video scenario based on that. Then, we took the scenario to a larger video consulting team to work out the kinks. After we felt good about our concept, we sent it out to the senior staff for final approval:

Our homework paid off. Approval was granted, and I started drafting the storyboard. I think it was one of our best yet.

Now all we had to do was put the dang thing together.

Next: The Bumper That Nearly Ate Us Alive

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Since arriving at the church, I’ve consistently been told that Christmas is a pretty big undertaking. (People usually say this with either a wicked smile or a look of pity.)

And it’s truth. Our Creative Arts team kicks into high gear when the holidays arrive, picking out special music, lining up soloists, and bringing on seasonal tech people. We decorate the stage. We decorate the foyer. We throw parties and brunches. We even do a super drumline edition of Little Drummer Boy in our Christmas Eve service.

We also go all out on the holiday messaging. And boy was I excited when my supervisor told me,

“Christmas… is all yours.”

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

My first job was to sit down with our pastor, Steve Bradley, and pick his brain on what our Christmas theme was going to be. Steve and I are both concept-oriented guys, so I brought in a notepad to catch all of the ideas that we were throwing about.

The big idea behind this year’s Christmas messaging is the ripple effect caused by Jesus’s birth. Like, isn’t it crazy to think that something as big as the Kingdom of God began with such a small birth… and in such an unassuming, backwater town as Bethlehem?

But the only way we knew how to communicate that was by calling it “Christmas Shockwave.” I did a couple of passes with that notion in mind:

We got the colors down on the bottom image (the blues, purples, and whites of a December evening). But “Christmas Shockwave” still sounded too… intense.

That’s when we decided to focus more on the ripple idea. My next pitch to Steve, after consulting with him and our video wizard, Vince, was this:

Closer to the mark! We had started to nail some more things we liked– a magical, storybook feel, old papery textures, and even the title was sounding good.

But looking at it, our music minister had a bright idea:

“I’m kind of thinking that instead of something shining ON Bethlehem, maybe we should have a glow coming OUT of it.”

Well, we could do that:

And approval was passed. After hunting for the right fonts and revamping the background, we arrived at our logo:

Now our official logo for the holiday season, we printed and manipulated this image in all kinds of ways… including making this into our giant billboard at the church entrance on FM 1488. Seeing your stuff in all of its enormous 10  X 20 glory or whatnot is a new kind of thrill.

But we still had more work to do. After all, the season was only just getting started….

Next: We Venture Into Animation

You’d Better Watch Out…

(The result of getting distracted in staff meetings...)

He will most certainly steal your gifts.