Conan's farewell speech: Kinetic Typography

This is amazing cool!!

Conan O'Brien Kinetic Typography from Jacob Gilbreath on Vimeo.

Upception - Trailer

I haven't seen Inception yet, but this clever mash-up makes me want to see it more than the actual trailers do...



Props to Scott Hodge for sending this along.

A look behind-the-scenes

(this article was originally posted on the Crossroads blog and e-newsletter on July 9th)

This morning I watched a video of a ridiculously cute 2 year old belting out the Lord’s Prayer. Amazing!! You can watch it here. Music means a lot in the life of most churches and Crossroads is no exception. Our Creative Arts team often gets comments and suggestions regarding Sunday music, so I thought I share a little behind-the-scenes look at how the music for Sunday gets chosen.

The Big Idea
First, it’s all about the sermon. The message that’s being preached from the pulpit is the linchpin of everything else we do. Pastor Glen supplies our team with his message topics as well as scripture references and themes in advance, so we start there. What is the “Big Idea” that we’re trying to get across. We look at what other service elements are planned for that day, for example drama sketches, videos, communion, baptisms, etc. Every single element – including the praise songs – needs to point people toward the Big Idea of that day.

Song Selection
There are currently about 70 songs on the Crossroads song rotation list. They can be categorized by Theme, Tempo & Key. We first look at the list, pulling out songs that seem to speak to the theme of the day. Now this is subjective, of course, so we depend on a lot of prayer for this step. We ask God to draw us to the songs that will help people worship Him and be open to His word. Next, we look at the Tempo of songs. You’ve probably noticed that we generally start things out upbeat. That’s on purpose. We want Sunday mornings to be a celebration of all that God is doing and has done. It’s hard to celebrate to a dirge. Depending on what other elements are involved, we often let the tempo slow down a bit as we approach the message. Our hope is that every Sunday, there can be times when people can forget about words on screens, forget about the band, and just feel alone in the room with God. Worship is very personal and everyone approaches it differently, but we strive to create an atmosphere where people can approach God with their defenses lowered and focus their attention and affection on Him. And finally the Key a song is played in factors in as well. Without going to deep into music theory, I can tell you that certain keys “lead in” to certain keys better than others. If you have a music background, you may be familiar with the “Circle of 5ths.” This is one tool we use.

What makes the cut
One thing that you may have noticed is we don’t worry about how old a song is. It really doesn’t factor in at all. We try to choose songs that are going to resonate the most with our crowd. Sometimes those songs are relatively new… sometimes they’re over 100 years old. We have at Crossroads adopted a “modern style” of music, because we believe it resonates best with the guests that we hope to draw in. We also will constantly be looking for new songs to use as we worship our unchanging God. But there’s no way we could ever ignore the wealth of incredible songs that have been penned through the ages… there’s too much value there. The challenge then is taking songs that were written for a different culture, and making them meaningful in our culture. Some make the transition relatively unchanged… some receive a higher degree of tweaking.

Well, there’s a lot more that could be written about this process and for some of you, this may have created more questions than it answered, but I would love to say “THANK YOU” to the incredible Creative Arts teams at Crossroads who invest so much into making Sunday mornings meaningful. If you have more questions, I’d love to talk about what we do. Call or email and we’ll get together… Starbucks is my personal favorite!!

In Christ,

Corbett

Factual or Inspirational

This story comes from Kem Meyer:

A blind boy sat on the steps of a building with a hat by his feet. He held up a sign which said: "I am blind, please help." There were only a few coins in the hat.

A man was walking by. He took a few coins from his pocket and dropped them into the hat. He then took the sign, turned it around, and wrote some words. He put the sign back so that everyone who walked by would see the new words.

Soon the hat began to fill up. A lot more people were giving money to the blind boy. That afternoon the man who had changed the sign came to see how things were. The boy recognized his footsteps and asked, "Were you the one who changed my sign this morning? What did you write?"

The man said, "I only wrote the truth. I said what you said but in a different way." I wrote: "Today is a beautiful day but I cannot see it."

Both signs told people that the boy was blind. But the first sign simply said the boy was blind. The second sign told people that they were so blessed that they were not blind. Should we be surprised that the second sign was more effective?

We can choose to give just the facts or we can choose creativity. We can relay information or we can inspire. As we write, draw or speak, we can simply show what is, or we can invest ourselves to take people to a different level... a different understanding of what's already plain to them.

Be inspirational!

Cultivate'09 & Story Chicago -Making Up For Lost Time

It seems like forever since I've attended a ministry/leadership conference. I may just go to two next week. I've been kind of eyeballing Story Chicago for a while now, wondering if I could get away for it. Today I finally did some checking into Cultivate '09 and it sounds like a perfect compliment to Story. Add in the fact that one is Tuesday and the other is Wednesday/Thursday and both within 45 minutes of each other... I smell a road trip!

I also smell a need to hit up some relative/friend in the Chicagoland area and avoid the cost of a hotel room... not that Crossroads wouldn't pay for a hotel room, but that's money that could be spent on ministry.

So who wants me? Honestly the closer to Aurora/Chicago the better as I'd rather spend my time catching up with friends than driving an hour home.

If you're within a decent drive of Chicago, and care about communication in or around church, check these two out. They both look amazing in their own rights. It takes a lot for me to want to be away from my family for three days, but this might just be the ticket.

Very Cool Art Piece

This isn't the post I've been threatening--that's still to come--but this was too cool not to share. I have friend (What up JS?) at the Savannah College of Art and Design and while looking him up, I came across this Senior Project by a different SCAD student. Enjoy!

Hotter than ever?

This is Scott Hodge, the pastor of the church Tricia and I attended before moving to Iowa and joining with Crossroads. I'm so proud... ;-) Oh and that's Mike Jones in orange, sporting the massive goatee...

Scott Hodge Live! from The Orchard on Vimeo.

This freakin' rocks!!

props to Terrace Crawford for sharing and to Calvary Chapel for ROCKIN my friday!