Spring Cleaning

Today I'm trying to make a list of things to do to make the site better. From looking at my stats I can see that a lot of my regular readers go through the splash page to get to the blog. My deepest apologizes for this and the issue is now resolved. (There, now one less click.. isn't that better? :) )

Another thing I want to tackle is video posting. It seems that my videos are taking very long to load and sometimes unreliable. If I could compress them into a smaller size, that would probably help, but I'm a little unsure of what type of compression to use. (Yesterday's video has to fully load before the quicktime window will show up) Anyone have solutions?

What else can I do to improve the site? what content would you like to see more of? Put any ideas in the comments.

Come, Don’t Stay

Today, Beyond kicked off it's new "Come, Don't Stay" series. (come as you are, don't stay that way). The series is a spinoff of John Burke's book "No Perfect People Allowed." The book advocates creating a 'come as you are culture within the church.'

Here's the opener (.mov, 1MB). This is my first time using After Effects for animation. I used some stock footage from BarnaFilms combined with AE's magnify and bulge effects for the magnifying glass. The foot, hand, and fingerprints were stock images. Everything else was AE generated. As always, feedback is appreciated, (even if i don't know you... speak up! :) )

Batty

Yes, it's true. There was a bat in our dorm last night. Here's the video. Enjoy!

Blue Man Group

Of course, the evening was great. Here's a review:

Our evening began in downtown Greenville at the Overlook Grill.


After supper, we snapped a few photos of Falls Park.


:) She's great


During the pre-show we witnessed the amazing turntable abilities of Mike Relm. Sorry for the quality of the following pics, it's hard to get good ones in a dark space this size.

Blue Man Group




Overall, great show! I even walked away with a few ideas for Beyond.

How to be a Megastar

Tonight I'm headed up to Greenville to see the Blue Man Group on the How to be a Megastar Tour.
Anna suprised me with tickets about a month ago. She's great. Expect a full update in pictures tomorrow.

Massive Attack, iTunes Sale

Currently iTunes has a wide variety of music on sale, ($7.99 for a complete album). Among the albums is Massive Attack's "Blue Lines" and "Protection." If you're a reader of avclub (if you're in to any sort of visual media, i'd suggest reading) you may have heard Ken mention them.

Other artists on sale range from Elvis to Def Leppard, there's something for everyone, check it out in the iTunes Store.

Twitter

Greg Atkinson writes about the online service Twitter:

Twitter is a free online “micro-blogging” service that allows you to post short updates (text based and limited to 140 characters) via SMS, instant messaging, the twitter.com website or several applications designed for the service.

Could this revolutionize the way churches send out announcements? Sounds great to me. What a great way to remind people of special events. What an even better way to remind technical teams of setup times.

*extra* i didn't mention it, but people are capable of subscribing to your feed via SMS text messaging. that's what i was getting at.

Kuler

Concerning Web and Graphic Design:
Adobe Labs has an excellent project that automatically generates color schemes according to a base color that you set. It's called Kuler. Check it out.

Hand Analysis

I know that I promised something from the motion graphics realm a week ago, but the Beyond team decided to extend its current series another two weeks. So to make up for the broken promise here's a screenshot of what's to come.