The Church Media Convention!
1st Day, Preparing for the Convention
For those of you who didn’t know, I went on to a convention this past week in Maryland . It is the Church Media Convention for the online community (and other stuff) of churchmedia.net. I attended classes on various software and other media ministry stuff. I got to play in the worship band for the general sessions as the drummer.
We arrived Sunday night, and went to the church to join some fellow CMN’ers for the first time the next day. I met up with all the people from ChurchMedia.net Monday night. The convention actually started Tuesday, but the band rehearsed on Monday night. We met the Covenant Baptist’s band (the church where the convention was held) before we practiced and they showed us their sound system and stuff. It was cool seeing it come together, since we were from all over the country and most of us had never played with each other before. Jeremy Tuel was our leader and electric guitarist, David Hochheiser was our acoustic guitarist. They were both from Maryland and volunteered to play with us. Mark Finley was the bass player; from Texas , and our keyboardist, Richard Williams, came from Missouri . And of course me, representing Tennessee on the drums.
The church that the convention was held in was very cool. They had a new building; only been up for about 8 months. They had a nice sound/video/light system.
The soundboard was an A&H 32 channel board. Each instrument’s area on the stage was equipped with an Aviom monitor mixer which allows each member of the band to have his own mix. They are SO cool! The stage was completely silent if you took off your earphones. I got to play the church’s set of Roland TD-20 electronic drums.
I can’t remember what light board they had, but they had about 32 ellipsoidal lights in the front, and 12 par cans in the back. We didn’t use much of their video system, but we had laptop’s and stuff going through their projector. We had a Tricaster for video streaming with two cameras. I think at one point there were around 105 viewers watching the stream from the internet.
Day 1 of the Convention
Today, the convention officially started. There were classes on various things from Adobe After Effects and Photoshop Elements to Google Picasa and Drupal websites.
At the beginnings of some sessions, they gave away prizes for answering trivia sessions. I answered the question about Tim Eason’s wife’s name (he’s the founder of ChurchMedia.net) and won a glow in the dark USB cable! At one keynote, one lucky prize winner who answered a very difficult question received a TWO DAY OLD PINNAPLE PIZZA!
Len Wilson and Jason Moore from Midnight Oil Productions (www.midnightoilproductions.com) presented the keynote, or general session, on “Using New Media to Communicate the Timeless Message.” The had a ton of useful information. Unfortunately though, a lot of the “no-no’s” that they mentioned, our church does!
*The band played for worship at the beginning and end of the keynotes.
Day 2 of the Convention
Today the keynote and worship was at the beginning of the day. Richard did the keynote. There were more classes including Advanced Photoshop with Phil Graves, and Adobe Premiere Video Editing with Joey Famiglietti.
I won a 256mb USB drive the size of my finger nail by running up to the front and grabbing it first! We got to visit Bridgeway Community Church in Columbia , which is in the process of building a new 1,200 seat auditorium. We got to see their FOH position with a Yamaha digital soundboard. He pushed some faders up, then changed to a different page of channels and we watched as the faders moved themselves! Then we got to tour their video editing/production suite. It was awesome! They had tons of video switching and editing stuff with almost 10 video monitors.
Day 3 of the Convention
Today was the last day of the convention. We did the same schedule as yesterday; keynote and worship at the beginning with classes following. Phil Graves did the keynote about keeping focus about what it’s all about in our media ministries. There were more classes from Richard, Len and Jason, and more.
Joseph B gave everyone in the band a free USB flashdrive with almost 150 stock photos on them. That was cool. Now I have two of those things.
It was an awesome convention. I’ve learned a lot, and hope the people back home will be interested in some ideas that I’ve picked up on. It was very interesting to actually meet and get to know the people I’ve been talking to on the internet for a couple of years now. ChurchMedia.net is a big community, and just the fellowship at the convention was worth coming. When we met the church’s band Monday night, they said, “You guys say you’re from all over the country, but you seem to know each other pretty well.” That really says a lot about our community and what a great place ChurchMedia.net is.
If you’re into media ministry or have any technical interests, you need to check out www.churchmedia.net. It has a forum, online tutorials and reviews, and a very low priced HUGE library of media to download called the Media Exchange Center . Anyways, this has been a really great experience and it’s definitely hard to describe in a blog post. Be sure to check out the pictures by clicking the link below.
http://picasaweb.google.com/maydavidj/CMNConventionPhotos?authkey=HjXKR7Zsb-M
