Shooting underwater events

radiantfirst — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 16:16:06 +0000

This summer we had several events that were water or underwater related. We went to the beach, schlitterbahn, had pool parties and most recently created some water/mud activities at our youth camp. For these events I could not afford to spend $3,000 on an underwater case for our camera so we decided to buy the kodak playsport. This little camera shoots in 1080i and 60p in case you want that slow motion into the water shot. In my opinion this camera is better than the flip and dual purpose because you don’t have to use it in the water but when you do its perfect.

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Creating a video sharing site for your ministry

radiantfirst — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:53:18 +0000

Recently I have been doing some web-desiging and was trying to figure out a way to showcase the hundreds of videos we currently have that are on youtube, vimeo and blip for our student ministry. Currently we keep our quality vids on vimeo, everything else on youtube and sermons on blip.

After doing some research I discovered that the cheapest solution was going to cost anywhere from $200 to $250 a month to host a video sharing site where I could aggregate all of our videos. All that to say that solution was too expensive so I continued to look for a free solution and found miro community. Miro Community in my opinions is one of the best ways to aggregate all of your videos into one location without spending an arm and a legg. You can upgrade your miro account for $100 a month and have your own domain if you choose (still cheaper than other solutions). What I like about Miro is that it pulls the feeds of my youtube, vimeo and blip accounts and allows me to customize the page so that it feels somewhat like our existing website. You can check out our miro community here.

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Creating a student ministry website with wordpress

radiantfirst — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 22:44:37 +0000

I have been working on creating a new student ministry website for several months now and finally launched it. www.lyf.net is the site. This was the most fun designing a site I have ever had. The site is easy to navigate, has great content and very easy to update. What was the trick you might ask….wordpress.

Here are a couple of things I did in designing the site.

1. Bought Headway Themes" target="_blank">Headway themes as the primary theme for wordpress. Best investment our ministry has ever made when it comes to web design. Headway themes allowed us the ability to design the site very easily without having to have a lot of coding knowledge.

2. Downloaded the slickr gallery plugin that pulls flickr images for your photo gallery. This was a great solution to push our photos onto our website with minimal effort.

3. Moved all of our videos on to external sharing sites such as youtube, vimeo and blip.tv and then pulled them into a video sharing site called Miro Community. Miro allows you to customize the site so it looks similar to your existing website without having to format everything special for flash etc…

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Using last year’s footage for this year’s promo

radiantfirst — Wed, 19 May 2010 01:25:28 +0000

I know this may sound common sense but promotional videos for camps and trips don’t have to be complicated. Coming up with an edgy commercial can be fun, however sometimes just showing what the event was like is often enough. In the below promotional video we shot our youth pastor talk about the local project and then took footage from the past two years at the event we are promoting. We store footage of practically every event we do on a server and then access it for various videos we do during the year. Using footage from last year is definitely a great way to promote this year’s event.

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Planning ahead

radiantfirst — Tue, 18 May 2010 01:48:38 +0000

If there is anything I have learned that has helped me to execute well…. it is the value of planning ahead. Occasionally I can wing it and come up with a great series or video in less than a week, but more times than not the best ideas take time to marinate and time to discuss in boring meetings. Its easy to focus on what is due this week and much more difficult to focus on a series or project that is 3 months away. One of the things I love about action method is that I can break up various tasks I have. Tasks that are due immediately, on-going projects and the favorite “backburner items”. Having a place to look at on-going projects on a periodic basis I have found is one of the keys to actually getting them done. If the idea is in your head and never makes it to paper or an online application, the likelihood of it being remembered is probably not that good.

Recently I asked one of my bosses if we could begin to think about our fall series in September so that I could create the pieces during the summer. Asking him this question forced both of us to figure out a meeting that would help us to land such a large decision. I love the thought of being able to be months ahead in the creative process because that helps to give me an edge that I just can’t have on a week by week basis.

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Understanding this generation

radiantfirst — Wed, 12 May 2010 02:18:32 +0000

Student Life has done it again. Year after year Student Life has been a leader in understanding teenagers and the world that they live in. Having worked for Student Life for several summers, I believe strongly in this organization and have grown to admire their passion to help teens to discover God’s word in a creative way.

I love this piece they created and can’t wait to share with other youth leaders in our youth ministry.

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Using google forms for sign ups

radiantfirst — Thu, 06 May 2010 13:47:10 +0000

We all need people to sign up for things these days. It would be a horrible thing to have an event that no one showed up to because we never asked them to commit. We need students to sign up for camps, mission projects and we need adults to sign up to volunteer at these projects. Recently I started using google forms to manage all of our sign-ups.

You can create a google form in a matter of minutes and the great thing about google is that its free. When creating a google form you have the option to embed it into your current website or link directly to the form itself. Another benefit to using google forms is that it allows you the opportunity to be notified via email every time someone submits an entry as well as being able to view all the results in an excel file that you can share easily with others.

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Using FBML in your facebook pages

radiantfirst — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:23:35 +0000

I was recently introduced to FBML by a friend of mine. Basically FBML (Facebook Mark Up Language) allows you to drop HTML into your facebook page. This is useful in creating facebook pages that look like a website and less like a typical facebook wall. I created one for a film race we are doing with our student ministry. Doing so allows you the ability to get the look of a website with the community that facebook offers. I think in the future I will be developing alot more facebook pages this way with the plan to abandon micro-sites that were once so hot.

Here are the steps I used to create the page:
1. Create a facebook page
2. Get 25 fans
2. Once you have 25 fans go to facebook.com/username and change the url so that your page has an actual url you can advertise
4. Search fbml and click add fbml to my page
5. Develop your html document in dreamweaver or another web development program
6. Upload any images you are using to outside service such as flickr or a web server
7. Replace the path of the images with the outside path you created
8. Go into your code and copy from table to table (the max width is 790)
9. Go to your facebook page and edit the page
10. Edit the fbml and past the code in there
11. Once your code is pasted you can go to your wall settings and make that fbml page be your landing page if you so desire

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Reality TV for your youth group (part 2)

radiantfirst — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:06:33 +0000

I posted about this earlier here. In January our student ministry embarked on a reality tv show format for a four week series we called True LYF. You can see all the videos on the facebook fan page we created. Four four different weeks we followed various students in our ministry and challenged them to do various spiritual disciplines such as (bible reading, prayer, scripture memory and fasting). The idea was to expose these disciplines to students in a fun and thoughtful way that was similar to that of the show “The Biggest Loser.”

Below is the promo video we created for the series.

True LYF Promo from LYF on Vimeo.

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Making the big ask

radiantfirst — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 02:14:10 +0000

Here is a fact for you, there are students and adults in your church who will never sign up to volunteer in your ministry. Here is another fact for you, some of these people would love to volunteer if you just ask them.

Sometimes we are afraid to ask people to volunteer their time who have not sought us out, when in fact we should see this as an opportunity for them to really serve in the Kingdom of God. Occasionally I will find a student or adult who is really into film-making but isn’t using their gifts in the church. I then call them up and ask them if they would consider using their talents to benefit the church. Most of the time they are interested and sometimes these volunteers turn out to be the best volunteers. We can’t be afraid of asking people to volunteer their time because of what we are asking for. What we are asking them to be apart of is kingdom stuff. This is the kind of stuff where people can really be used by God in tremendous ways.

Think of some key people in your church that you believe could really help in the needed areas of your ministry. Don’t cross them off your list too quickly if they are already committed to other parts of the church or you feel that they wouldn’t be interested because your area of ministry is not important enough. You’d be surprised at how many people will actually say yes if you ask them to be apart of Kingdom work.

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