Pete Bishop

Color,gobos and projections

Rosco is starting a periodic free online seminar on using color, gobos and projections. Looks Cool. Register here.

Good Marketing..or...?

from the wall street journal. maybe not news to everyone, and certainly not the first (or last) time something like this has happened. ..... it sure feels like a breech of community.

Download This: YouTube Phenom Has a Big Secret - WSJ.com

Jott

Shari ( thank you Shari!) sent me an invite to Jott. It is appearing to be very helpful. Its kind of like email by phone. Yourself and others. Its proving to be a great way to quickly get stuff out of my head when Im out and about.

Virb

So I've been playing around inside the community of Virb the last month and half or so.. nothing serious. just sticking my toe in the water... I never resonated with myspace.. just couldn't get into it. So anyway I'm over there tonight and I'm checking out some groups and I find the Jesus group. 666 people are interested in Jesus... had to giggle.....ps. virb seems very cool. Ill keep exploring

Had to...

Highrise is here

Oh Yea!!!

Bzzzzz.....

So this weekend I got the chance to go see an "A" level Christian artist at a local church. Literally this guys is probably the best in the world at what he does and it was very cool that this church brought him in. I felt very awkward for the church and him though as everything that could possibly go wrong did go wrong. His monitors went out, his Mic stand collapsed, the pa belched various noises through out the night, not all of his gear was placed on stage, bad cables, 2 incredibly intoxicated ( or demon possessed) fellows walk in half way through and started yelling etc... What do you do when things go wrong? here are Pete's 5 or so things that you can do to help thwart disaster in a production.

    1. Pre Plan- Make sure  you have a stage layout and input list of everything the artist is going to need. Make sure you know every inch of the signal flow. Make sure the people that are their are well equipped to do what they are trying to. When you can Make sure you know the production from top to bottom. Anticipate where you may have trouble and make a mental or written note of it.

    2. Check double check and triple check everything. Are all your connections good?  Everything working? (oh yea.. do this before people are walking in.)

    3. Serve the artist. Your there to make sure the artist has everything they need be it the worship leader, presenter, Pastor whatever... You there to serve them and get them what they need to be successful. Make sure they are. Ask them what they like and don't, if you can do it, honor their wishes. ( at one point on this night the artist asked someone to get him a wedge for a monitor after his in ears went out. ... no one moved even after repeated asks)

    4. Have a backup plan. Be two steps ahead. Don't take your eyes off the stage. When things break.. and they will.... what are you going to do? Know in advance, be able to react and fix the situation before anyone knows what happened. Nobody reacted to any of the various mishaps... most of them were very simple fixes.

    5. Be transparent. If you have a great night as a tech. then that means no one should know you exist. At one point in this night the soundman was standing up yelling at the artist on the stage the various things that were wrong and how he ( the artist) could fix them from stage... not good.

Believe me I'm not bagging on the crew or this church. I have had to painfully learn all these lessons over the years. Most things can be avoided with careful pre planning, proper implementation/training and a good backup plan.

ps. The artist still rocked and was a pro through out the whole thing!

A 6ft Hairy Thumper

So part of the tech team at Crossroads spent yesterday evening shooting spots for our Nighttime Flashlight Easter Egg Hunt. It involved a 6 foot hairy rabbit in tank top, a dentist office, a cop, a barn and a wild wife! I haven't laughed so hard in a long time. Thanks to Steve and Mike and Jay and Tammy. After the shoot the bunny stalked downtown Adrian. Start looking for the spots this weekend.

The Passion

Creating Passionate Users is one of my  favorite blogs and this is a great post... I especially. Like this paragraph.

Finally, if you really want your employees to be passionate about the company, take lessons from UI and Usability: let people do what they want and need to do, and get the hell out of their way. Unfortunately, too many of our employers are like really bad software--frustrating us at every turn, behaving inconsistently, not giving us a way to learn new things and develop new, cool capabilities, etc.

It makes me beg about a million question of myself in terms of where am I getting in peoples way to do what God has them to do.

Not sure why I find this funny but..

As far as technology goes, this is both interesting and makes me giggle...

Maybe the most intriguing thing to happen in cell batteries in the past couple of years, these babies work like any regular AA batteries--but you can recharge them using the powered USB port in your desktop or laptop  Mac or PC.