Saving Creativity

Two weeks, man I am slacking off right now.  It’s been two weeks without anything to stir the creativity in your soul.  I really should get a bit more serious about this…maybe in Twenty ought ten!  Here are the last couple of videos from “The Big Give” series that theMet finished up this past weekend:

This one was edited by Andrew, most of the footage is mine, but Andrew and I tag teamed this one while in Uganda…

The Ghost from The MET Church on Vimeo.

This video we just re-recorded the VO to update it and Doug shot all the footage…

Mexico OSY Camps from The MET Church on Vimeo.

I quickly edited this footage together to a V.O that was written by one of our missionaries…

Alpha and Omega from The MET Church on Vimeo.

So I’ll keep this simple:

12 videos on 4 weeks keeps a brother busy.  Thankfully I have been working with someone else on all of these, and I thank God for Andrew.  What a great co-worker he is, he really inspires me to do better work!

This one was edited by me:

Aggies Arts from The MET Church on Vimeo.

This one was edited by Andrew and was sung live by Jared Anderson, an amazing artist!

Carrier from The MET Church on Vimeo.

This one was edited by Andrew:

Before and After from The MET Church on Vimeo.

Enjoy.  Oh just as an FYI update for those of you who helped support Samuel.  Last I heard we are just short of supporting him.  So here are a few more updated pictures of him!

Here is what Andrew and I have been up to at work these two weeks, I was DP on the 1st one, and talent on the 2nd one.  Andrew pulled out some great stops on the motion tracking!  Good job Andrew!!

Andrew produced the piece and the talent did an amazing job (it was me…).  He chose a bunch of stirring images and we worked together to light and place all of the images.  This one was also edited by Andrew…

Kingdom Of Comfort from Andrew Schuurmann on Vimeo.

So here’s the update, sorry it’s been so long between them.  I was sent to Uganda by theMet to tell some stories, acquire great footage, and generally be what I hoped to be…creative.  What happened today will forever change who I am and how I view my life in America.  We went to Pastor Henry’s church in Njeru, Uganda, and while we have been recording some great testimonies to what theMet has perviously done here in Jinja, Uganda, have struggled this trip to find that story that rips your heart out and makes mashed potatoes of it.  Well we found it today.  God wrecked me when I was introduced to this young man…

Meet Samuel, he doesn’t know how old he is, does odds and ends to make maybe 100 schillings a day, and oh yeah….and most of the time the people he does the tasks for don’t pay him, kinda like leaving a tract at a restaurant table instead of a tip.  He eats maybe once a day, and goes to sleep crying at night because all he can think about is how hard it will be tomorrow to survive.  To top it all off: his dad died before he moved to Njeru and his mom died right after he moved there.  So now that we’ve established that he is in a situation that seems impossible…here is where we all come in:

It takes $50 a TERM to send Samuel to school.  For that $50 per term (3 terms a year) they get: uniforms, books, two solid meals a day and an honest to God education so he can make something of himself.  What he needs is our help.  I want to support this boy so that when he turns into a man, he can support his family.  So that his children will see hope and want to make something of themselves.  I want Samuel to be able to go to school for the next 5 years.  This is really where we all come in.  For every person that donates $50 to sending Samuel to school..I am going to send you a note card with specific things to pray for him and…a rock.  The prayer card is to remind you every day what to pray for, and the rock is to remind you that you have it so easy in America and that Samuel is back in Uganda struggling to just survive.  That the hardest thing you have to decide is what you want on your salad or what coke to drink, and that Samuel has to fight every…single…day to just eat.

For those of you who struggle with math, here is the break down: 3 terms a year X 5 years…that’s $750 to change a child’s present and future.  We can’t change his past, but we sure as hell need to change his future.  So I need 15 people to give Samuel a life, give him a chance at a future.  We are cutting a video together and each person who gives money will be given a link to hear Samuel’s story.  Once we launch it at theMet, I will post it for everyone else here.

So here’s my plea to you:  give to something bigger than yourself.  Go without your coffee for a couple of weeks (that would be you… you vente triple machiatto, no whip, soy milk drinkers you..), or maybe go to Supercuts instead of snooty salon (and when people ask you why you got your hair cut there, tell them Samuel’s story), or maybe don’t go out to eat every night and send that money.  God really challenged me to do something about Samuel, so are you human enough to care more than saving your creature comforts?  I know I am….  Over the next few weeks I am going to post a more stories of what God is doing in the lives of the people in Uganda, get ready for inspiration and heart wrenching stories.  God is bigger than America, and I hope through these stories, that God will give all of us a little insight into His heart for others around the world.

If you want to participate post a comment below and I will email you with the details.  I collect the money and once we have an entire year paid for, I will send it over to help Samuel out.

Thanks for taking the time to read and to help a young man out.  Your reward will be visible through a changed life…. Samuels!

For all of you over achievers in the world here are a few links to different organizations that will help you get a better understanding of the HOPE that is being spread around the world, and how you can be a part of something that is bigger than our little…American…worlds…

www.mochaclub.org

www.invisiblechildren.com

www.worldvision.com

Hope you have gotten the MMS update for your iPhone, if not, just update iTunes, plug in ye’ iPhone, update your phone and then restart your iPhone.  Once it restarts you should have a nifty little option under your text messaging icon that will give you the ability to MMS pictures or video to anyone in your contacts!

Saw this on the front page of Digg.com.  Awesome creative use of two forms of art: skateboarding (actually long boarding to be exact) and technology to power the colored tubes.  Even the tubes beat to the music, so there must have been some cool sync.

A blog that I follow (murphy24p) had a great post on the connections with people in our lives.  I loved this line form his post:

I guess it really struck me how far I have moved, in such a short amount of time, to a wholly electronic connection with people.  I mean, it has only been 4 months since I couldn’t check email, scan tweetdeck or check who commented on my wall with my phone.  Before that I actually had to sit down and check it on my desktop at home (Trinity blocked Facebook and Twitter…maybe that was a bigger benefit than a curse!)  Can I confess something:  I really want to start over, I mean get away from everything being on a screen, or via my phone.  How about instead of shooting off an email or iChat session, I should be picking up the phone or meeting someone, as Murphy suggests, over my beloved coffee.

Here is a piece that really inspired me this morning, hope I haven’t posted this yet, but Dan Stevers is a great motionographer and does some amazing work!

Dan Stevers’ 07 Reel from Dan Stevers on Vimeo.

Creativity often strikes at the most inopportune times…like at 3am, or at 4:23pm.  I follow this blog as much as I can but Josh posted a video with a single take music video.  That led me to the behind the scenes video for the music video.  I want to try this so badly, just for my own selfishness, to try to pull something like this off would be awesome…

Music video:

Behind the scenes:

So my good friend Adam, over at progressisbeautiful.net (which you all should be reading), was interviewed by Murphy24p.  It’s a great article and I love the spirit of the article.  The discussion is here so go and check it out!  I love what Adam said about his talents and gifts!  If you haven’t checked out his work, please go and check out what’s current over at NewSpring.cc and see what serious amounts of creativity look like!  I am finishing up my first video project here at theMET.  It’s a little promo piece for Truth, theMET’s youth group.  It’s for an all night party/rave that they are putting on.  An email came through this morning about how student’s lives are being changed and how teens are being won to Christ through the program, super exciting….

So…here’s what’s inspiring me right now:

.: Dirt Conference:  It’s a conference that is set to inspire a ton of church creatives to do more with less, and inspire their congregations to live more unabashedly for Christ.

Dirt Mashup from dirt conference on Vimeo.

.: I am also being inspired by this piece.  I really like the color treatments of the footage…

Church from Dan Diaz on Vimeo.

And certainly not least of all is this video, by far the best Adam has ever done…

The Story of Jad Dean from NewSpring Production on Vimeo.

So sorry for the long delay in posting.  It’s been a crazy 20 days, and I can’t believe that it’s been that long since I created or posted anything.  My first week here at theMet has been great!  Meeting lots of new people having some good conversations and getting a lay of the land.  My edit suite is almost completely set up and I am ready to start creating again.  I went without the interwebs now for almost 4 days and it was good to get to my laptop and get online…ohhh I have missed it!

I went and saw District 9, with a couple of co-workers.  The movie begins by filling you in on backstory about Wikus, a slightly dorky, but good hearted gentleman.  An unknown actor by most people’s definitions, Sharlto Copley did a great job of showing depth and balancing in his character.  He actually had acting chops (somewhat surprising) and was very moving when he needed to be and comedic to lighten the mood.  This movie is not supposed to be a comedy, but there were often little things that made you laugh throughout the movie.  Without these brakes it would have been to much heavy.  The other major players in the film were the aliens.  They had their own language with subtitles, and the were very life like and realistic.  Most of the shots were composited so the other actors in the film did a good job of adapting and not making the composition to fake.

I definitely came into the movie with a preconceived idea of what the plot was and how it was going to end.  I actually chalked it up to another Scifi movie special, just with Peter Jackson’s vision and skills.  I was totally wrong.  Don’t go to watch this movie if you expect Lord of the Rings meets Alien, this movie is so much more.  I was a bit worried from the trailers that it was going to be a politically charged movie about immigrants and how a country treats them.  However, if there was an agenda…I couldn’t find it.  I actually found myself lost in a world of an alien ship had actually come to earth.  It wasn’t so far fetched and was set in current days with footage of Johannesburg, South Africa to set the stage.  With a mix of documentary and interview footage, along with some “live” footage, the film was well balanced to give you enough story to be on the edge of your seat, but not giving away their hand.  What a story it is!  A plot based around a unwitting character being thrust into the middle of a very simple task that takes him through the underground of MNU, and through the other side.  I found myself not knowing how the film’s plot was twisting and turning it’s way to the end.  It truly kept me guessing the entire time.  The end of the movie is very much designed to keep the story open and ready for a sequel, and I would go and see District 9 Pt.2, I think Peter Jackson has proven himself as a sequel master, although I won’t ever go see the behemoth that is King Kong II if it were to ever come out.  3 hours of Jack Black is just to much for anyone…

I give this movie a solid 4 out of 5 stars.

20 days or 116,800 hours till I start my new job.  So many changes coming.  We have had a bunch of good showings on our house, no big bites yet, but this weekend could change that.  Ok, enough said about that.

I do have a question for everyone, they asked me what my must have plugins are for FCP.  I named the usual, G-films transitions and Magic Bullet.  But what are the other must have plugins that I haven’t yet discovered?  What do you use in FCP that really help polish that video piece till it’s buffed out goodness?

Ahh, my ADD is kicking in.  You should check out today’s free downloads on iTunes, the Neon Leon song “Push to Freeze” is a decent ambient song with lots of good guitar riffs throughout.  Although not as toasty as Owl City, I am digging these guys right now, especially for a free song.

Ok more to come today, I am hunting down reasons for everyone to upgrade to the iPhone 3GS, even if you own an HD camera, two videos that will blow your socks off and a new review on Final Cut Pro 7!  All those updates before noon EST!

So I guess it’s been a while since my last post.  Things have been so crazy around the Ackerman household and at Trinity.  With a job change in the next 3 weeks, moving 1500 miles away, packing, selling a house and making sure I have a happy wife and son…I have been slammed.  Things are tracking right along though!  Creatively I have been working to finish a lot of projects that have been hanging over my head and I am excited to launch the final version of Trinity’s fall series: Philippians: Live the Letter.  I am almost done with the bumper and have changed a few things with it since I last posted about it.  Any thoughts or ideas would be so great to hear from you AE pro’s out there.  What could I do better with the typography or ideas to help really polish the entire bumper!  Please comment and let me know how I can improve it…

Philippians Series Bumper from TrinityWired Productions on Vimeo.

I have gotten away from my bi-weekly inspiration posts and I will be getting back to that today.  My friend Adam over at ProgressIsBeautiful posted a bunch of videos but one that really struck me is Clayton’s Story.  What an amazing story and what an amazing young guy.  If you can watch his memorial service or his message at ABC, and not cry, then you have no soul!  Clayton’s legacy is one that has really challenged me to not just go through life, but to truly live life to the fullest!

Clayton’s Story from Jacob Lewis on Vimeo.