Captain's Corner

Well, I haven’t been around here too much lately… and there’s a reason why.

Last weekend here at Lake Pointe we performed Keith Green’s mini rock opera, The Prodigal Son Suite. For those who haven’t heard it, it’s a beautiful piece of music, relating Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son through several different movements. Only we didn’t just perform an updated version of the music… we added video. Lots of video. And we effected the live video that we interspersed with the preproduced video. And yours truly did a good bit of the work on it. I edited the preproduced pieces and I helped develop the effect look on our live video.

Actually making it work though was a whole other ordeal. We were unable to use a click track (our preferred method of syncing videos with performances here at Lake Pointe) since the music changes so drastically several times during the piece. So our TD’s (the TD or Technical Director runs the video switcher) fingers were afire bringing effects and overlays and taking them right back out. I acted as Roll-In Operator, since I knew exactly when the videos needed to roll. Our Side and House Producers helped with timing on lighting cues, transitioning from recorded to live and back to recorded video, and our amazing director Wes Hartley tied it all together.

So this thing was a pretty big deal, and I gotta tell you, when Saturday morning rolled around and I was exporting the actual clips which I had finished editing Friday, I knew one thing only. The video was crap. The effects on switcher were trite and useless. This whole project was going to bomb. Of course, whenever I do a project that is challenging and frustrating and extremely time consuming (due to my HS reunion I had Tuesday-Friday last week to do this project), I usually feel that it’s my worst work and is utterly useless by the time I’m done with it…

I could not have been more wrong. The music and video fit seamlessly, everything was perfect. In fact, we all earned a standing ovation at the end of it. It was an amazing feeling to know that something I was so tied to ended up being so effective. It was actually really cool to see how our team worked so hard together to do something, knowing that no one in the audience will really know how many people worked on the piece.

And as an added bonus for all my fellow Reunionites, Brent made an appearance during one of the movements, as I used the Luggage piece (originally cut to Brent’s song “Circle Unbroken”) as part of the video.

So check out Lake Pointe’s version of The Prodigal Son Suite… You’ll need Quicktime 7 to view, if you don’t have it let me assure you it’s worth the time to get it…

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