Inspiration: The Third & The Seventh

Check out this video below, be sure to view it fullscreen. 

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

I came across this short film, by Alex Ramos, about a year back.  I was blown away by the beauty and realism of this film.  I found myself trying to figure out how he filmed it, what cameras did he use, where did he shoot it, only to find out that it was all fully CG animation.  I couldn't believe something so warm and natural, could be created using a computer and software ,until I saw his compositing breakdown and the making of video.

This film reminds me that the computer is just a tool and that the only limitations we have as creators is our imaginations and our drive to see those things we visualize develop onto the canvas.  

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My Fave 5 of 2010

Sermon branding has to be the favorite part of what I do here at PVC.   I love the whole process from sitting in sermon planning meetings to designing concepts and then seeing all the pieces come together at the end. These my top five favorite sermon series graphics of 2010.  

Regeneration: Was the first series of 2010.  

Perspectives of Jesus: This was a fun one to design.  The series was based on the different images and how they represented Christ.  You can check out some of the original images I used to create the graphic here.  

Going Places:  I'm always up for the challenge of pulling off faux 3D using Illustrator and photoshop. 

Faith & Luck:  This was my favorite of the year.  I love how the branding extended beyond print and ended up with a pretty crazy stage set.  You can check out that set here.  

Contagious Christianity:  I really like the simplicity of the look for this series.  Check out the sermon bumper my brother Oz created for it here.  

Fun with 1080 X 4748 pixels

On December 5th we opened our new auditorium at PVC.  We went from a dual screen setup to one triple wide screen.  The screen physically measures out to 11ft x 50ft.  

Our setup gives us flexibility to project different sources to the canvas.  This could be anything from full graphic or video, and even picture in picture. This gives us the ability to go from a center video over a graphic to a full screen lyrics over motion video to speaking IMAG over graphics with side notes.  Though I've only work with these dimensions for a couple of weeks I can't help but think of the possibilities with working with such a unique space.   

This image with the strings was live IMAG with a transparent PNG file on a top layer, to give the illusion the live video was blending into the sky.  

Below are a few examples of the graphics built out for the screen and some photos of them projected in service.  

I'm blessed to work with a talented team who is passionate about what they do.  It takes alot more then graphics to pull a service off, everything from lighting, staging, song selection, video production, and live IMAG goes into planning each service.  Which makes for some intense discussions through out the week. We have one goal and that's to create a distraction free environment where believers and non believers can come in worship and receive life through God's word.  

Be sure to check Mankin Media, they are the company that helped create and deploy the system we are using.  

Contagious Christianity Series Branding

Three days before leaving on vacation I found out that we were going to change directions on a series that was starting that weekend.  

Since I only had a couple of hours to turn this project around I went with a simple stock image, some color treatment and plain text.  

They liked the art so much the next questions was, "Can we make that into a video."  Being short on time we starting looking at stock video options. Most of them range from $75-$300 and weren't exactly what we were looking for.     

Instead, I went and pickuped a box of matches from the dollar store, and the rest was tv magic.  We first tried stacking the matches side to side but found that it would burn too quickly.  We used the opposite ends of the matches as spacers to give a even gap between the matches.  This help slowing down the burning affect.  

I really liked how the finished piece turned out, proves that design doesn't always have to be jaw dropping or overly complicated to effectively communicate.  I'm really proud to work with a team that can come together to turnaround a project like this in a few days time.  

Check out the finished bumper video below.  

On another note, the music came from a new resources we found out about, audiojungle.net. They have a wide selection of tracks and reasonably priced. 

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Axis' Guardrail Set Design

A couple of months back I met with our high school ministry team. regarding their new series that was coming up, "Guardrails."  Artwork wise the concept was pretty simple.  In order to take it up a level we decided to carry the look across the stage wall.  We wanted students to feel they were looking across a canyon as they entered the room. 

Once the right image was chosen, I sized it up to the proportions of the walls.  I cut out the projector screen and used that as a presentation graphic.  We printed out wallpaper like strips of the image, using our 41in plotter. 

The high school staff did a great job putting up the wall graphic and constructing the guardrails, which was constructed using pvc pipe which was spray painted metallic silver. 

I love being able to see ideas being executed.

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The Making of the "Storm the Gates" Artwork

This is a key art piece I created for my friends at Glad Youth Ministries. "Storm the Gates" is the theme for their youth conference this year.  I've had the privilege of working with them for the past five years.  They wanted it to have a epic feel and suggested movies like 300 and Gladiator to draw inspiration from.  

The first thing that popped into my head, once I heard the title, was having a army of people taking over castle wall.  I went to one of my favorite movies for inspiration,  Lord of the Rings. 

Though conceptually it took a while, the actual constructing of the piece is not very complicated. Below is a break down.  

I created the text in Illustrator, using a technique I picked up on making shards of glass.  Oonce the text was in outlines form, I drew lines cutting across the text.  Selected all and used the pathfinder divide button to cut-up the pieces.  Once the pieces where cut-up I selected different sections and shifted them around.  

I didn't have a access to castle gates so I had to resort to stock imagery.  After searching for a head on perspective, with no luck, I ended up going with the image above.  The original images shows a castle wall from the side, since I planned on using it more as a silhouette of the wall, It didn't have to be perfect.  I copied and flipped the image and merged them together to form the front of the gate.  Once that was complete I masked out the sky and was good to go.  

Now the piece was starting to take form and now knew layout wise where I wanted to go.  I used some splatter brushes from bittbox.com to mask out parts of the wall as well as adding textures to the text and rest of the piece.

The image above shows the clouds that were composited into the background.  

This is the crowd image I used.  Again alot of masking with the splatter brush and soft-brushes were added to this image.   

At this point a dark background was added towards the bottom of the piece.  A couple of overlaid textures where added as well.  Using the Hue/Saturate layer effect some blue tint was brought into the piece.  And with a soft brushed masked out a few areas that I wanted to keep black and white.  

Last, the color was added, I added a layer with color on top of everything and masked out the areas I didn't want.  I made sure to add the highlight glow on the heads to give the appearance of light being cast from the distance.  

That's the basic breakdown of this piece, there were several other details that went into the making of the this piece.  Hopefully this shows how to take different images and make them work as one piece.  If you have any questions feel free to drop me a line below or hit me up on the contact page.  

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Faith & Luck Series

Summer has started and have to admit I really had some fun with the design of this series.  From art, stage, to atmosphere around the building.  I believe this has to be one of the best series we've launched coming from the production team.  I'm blessed to work along side some talented individuals that help make this all happen.  Below is a  break down of some of the key elements.  

THE ART

Once we decided on a carnival theme I new where I wanted to go with the artwork. The reasoning behind going with the carnival theme was that the sermon content was going to be pretty heavy and wanted the brand to give it a lighter feel to balance it all out.  I drew inspiration from some old circus posters I found online.  Below are some rough sketches I started with.   

One extra element we did for this series is that I designed some posters that were posted all over the building to promote the new series.  This was something we hadn't done in a while. It helped create some buzz leading up to the start of the series.  

Here's a timelapse video of the making of faith & luck art.

THE WORSHIP GUIDE

We like changing up our worship guide layout.  I came up with a long double sided guide.  The finish size came out to 4.5x10.25.  In order to use something with this length we ended up printing on cardstock to give it some stability.  You can download a sample of our guide here.  

THE INTRO VIDEO

Oz, my brother who also works here, animated the artwork to make a pretty sweet sermon bumper.  This was played right before the speaker went up.    

THE STAGE

The stage was a huge team effort to pull off.  We were blessed to have a professional carpenter come in and volunteer his time to build the framing system for the center piece.  We used our large format plotter to print off patterns that we glued down to the frame.  Jorge, our stage design guru, really made it pop by adding textures and lighting.  We also created a center logo piece, that gave a nice background during speaking IMAG.  

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Axis Wall Banners

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Here's a little time-lapse of the making of it along with a short clip oh how it looks installed in the room.  

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Bling Ur Screen: True Love

This piece was originally created to promote our Good Friday service here at PVC.  Whenever I work on any graphics that subject is "Jesus" I put on Phil Wickham as the soundtrack.  One song in particular, "True Love", makes me remember that the greatest love ever displayed was that of God giving up his on son for my sins.  

Desktop wallpaper available here.  

iPhone Version available here.  

"Blessed Are" PSD file available for download

This is a series design I did a while back for our High School dept. I had the opportunity to take my own photos for this piece, you can find out more about how this project came about here. The high-res PSD file is now available for download.