What do you think? Did they nail it?

Watch the first episode here:

SX:digital – March 09 from Sydneyanglicans.net on Vimeo.

This was the first significant outdoor event I can remember us doing and none of us on the team had much experience doing this sort of thing before. In the process of putting it on we learnt a few valuable lessons.

Things we did right:

1. Had the right people taking responsibility. Having people who know what needs to be done, who to ask if they don’t, and can get it done makes a huge difference. Good people take the burden off the person at the top and make it easy to put on big things.
2. Had excellent volunteers helping. Many willing hands make light work, and having a large army of volunteers made the day so much easier. They were a great help moving gear, setting up staging and fetching water in the heat of the day.
3. Hired a good projector and screen. Your little projector you use inside will not cut it outside, and neither will a little portable projector screen. We hired an inflatable screen and used a 16,000 Lumens projector (the one mounted in your church is probably around 2,000). Without it the video content would’ve been impossible to see in daylight.
4. Marketing. Thanks to some creative people we managed to get an article in the local paper, banners on bridges, flyers in letter boxes and given out by hand.

Things we could do better next time:

1. Leave more time for setting up staging. Despite the large army of volunteers who helped set up the staging, it would’ve been handy to have started this an hour earlier. Staging is critical to the entire setup – until it was completed we were unable to set up sound equipment and instruments and have rehearsals and sound checks. Better to have it finished early than having it hold up everything else.
2. Get a more powerful front-of-house sound system. The one we had sounded nice and clear and adequately covered the park in sound, but it wasn’t as loud as we would’ve liked. It’s also important to note that you need big subwoofers outdoors. The high frequencies are directional and carry well, but low frequencies aren’t directional, so they need a lot more power.
3. Picking the correct aspect ratio for the video output. I’m probably nitpicking here, but the screen was better suited to 16:9 and I had prepared only for 4:3. Had I known I would’ve ensured we could’ve made full use of the available screen real estate.
4. Plan for the wind. It was really windy on the day we did this. Someone was smart enough to have a sandbag for the lectern, but a few more would’ve been handy for the cymbals on the drumkit. Don’t forget those microphone windsocks either.

There’s not much to them, just a few things you need:

1. A sermon series to preach on with a cool name
2. A nice texture to use as a background
3. A good font

So lets give it a go!

I think I’ll preach through Revelation. And I’ll call the series ‘What are you waiting for?’ (inspired my Mark Dever).

Now I need a background. Remember, this might have to work as the background to presentation slides so go either dark or light, not a bit of both.

Here’s a free image of a rusty bit of metal I found on TextureKing. I figure rust captures something of the passing-away nature of this world.

There are loads of places where you can get good, free textures and images like this one. Here’s a few:

BgPatterns, Stripe Generator, Lost and Taken, Wood textures, BitBox textures, paper textures, Texture King, Grunge Textures, Squidfingers, Colour Lovers, Urban Dirty, Free 3Ds Textures, 400+ High Quality Patterns, 99 Free Canvas, Paper, Paint and Metal Textures, 36 Cool Free Textures!

Now we find a font that works. The place to do that is dafont.com. You enter your text and it shows you a preview in thousands of different fonts. Most of them are free to download and install as well. The examples above are all standard Helvetica, so we’ll run with that.

All that remains is to put the two together with a touch of transparency on the background colour: 

 You could do something like this for the powerpoint slide:

It’s not quite up to Mars Hill standard, but it would do the job and it took me about 20 mins.

The trick is then to use your new artwork consistently and everywhere. On the website, on the sermon powerpoint slides, on the hand outs. Why not have a go for your next sermon series at your church?

Allow us to introduce ourselves. We are Ben and Caleb, two mates from Sydney, Australia. This site is dedicated to making technology serve our churches. We have a passion for Jesus Christ, a desire to see his gospel grow, and a hunch that technology and new-media might present some opportunities for this cause by helping us communicate more clearly, widely and efficiently.

So here is what we’ve learnt and what we’re still learning about church and web, sound, video, design, software etc…

We hope that this site will become a great resource for you and your church. We also hope that this site might become a community hub for people who are into this kind of thing, so we’d love you to come back and comment and share what you’ve learnt as well.

cheers
Ben and Caleb