We hope you think the new site is pretty, but more than that, we hope you’ll check out all of the Echo 2010 information. You can get started on the Details page or on the Speakers page. Then, when you’re ready, you can register for Echo 2010 here.

Happy browsing!

If you pre-ordered a 2009 Echo DVD set, your order has been shipped. For everybody else, now’s the time to grab your set. As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, the DVD set includes some great stuff:

• Keynote Sessions from Ben Arment, Mark Steele, and Phil Cooke
• The Church Panel (featuring Carlos Whittaker, Bobby Gruenewald, Scott Hodge, Cynthia Ware, and Conway Edwards)
• The After Effects User Group
• Breakout Session MP3s
• Breakout Session PDFs
• 8 Motion Graphics Tutorials by Barton Damer and Trent Armstrong

Head over to the Echo Store to order yours.

•  Keynote Sessions from Ben Arment, Mark Steele, and Phil COoke
•  The Church Panel
•  The After Effects User Group
•  Breakout Session MP3s
•  Breakout Session PDFs
•  8 Motion Graphics Tutorials

Just for fun, we’re including a sample of the Motion Graphics Tutorials here for free. From Designer and Animator Barton Damer, we have the first of his series on building a logo animation from Illustrator to After Effects and Cinema 4D.

Next up, Motion Designer Trent Armstrong take this first session to walk through turning a still graphic into a loop— or two.

Echo 2009 DVD Sets will ship out in two weeks, so pre-order yours today.

We’re very grateful to Brad and Adam (also from CMD) for running the live stream during Echo. Brad and Adam had a great setup, conducted some interviews, and even facilitated the stream of our panel discussion. Plus, they drove all the way from Michigan to help us out. Brad also taught a breakout and helped with the After Effects User Group, and we can’t thank him enough for everything.

Check out ChurchMediaDesign.tv today.

Echo attendee surveys are coming in and one of the things that people really seemed to enjoy was the Q&A we did with each of our keynotes after their talks. To facilitate our Q&As we asked for audience questions via Twitter and then we sorted through them and displayed them on the auditorium screens. Thankfully, our friends at ParaTweet have a great product that’s really easy to use for this sort of thing.

Just as it did at the Catalyst events of the past year, ParaTweet took audience participation and interactivity to the next level at Echo. When I moderated the church panel at Echo, I remember feeling so relieved to see excellent questions pouring in via Twitter and displayed via ParaTweet. Frankly, I relied pretty heavily on ParaTweet because our audience’s questions were much better than mine. Plus, the ParaTweet moderation and filtering features ensured that no obscene Twitter spam ended up on our screens. That would’ve been embarrassing. (If anything obscene was going to end up on our screens, we wanted it to be intentional and to be our idea. Kidding.)

If you’ve got a live event coming up and you’re looking to facilitate some interaction via Twitter, check out ParaTweet.

This entry was originally posted on the COLLIDE blog. 

As you may know, Mark is the President and Executive Creative of Steelehouse Productions where he creates art for business and ministry through the mediums of film, stage and animation. But there’s so much more to Mark:

• He co-hosts the wildly entertaining and consistently informative Steelehouse Podcast with Jeff Huston. You should take a listen.
• He lends his creative talents to Veggie Tales.
• He has written three hilarious and insightful books about life and faith: Flashbang, Half-Life / Die Already, and Christianish.
• His performance in the Igniter video “Boys and Grills” cracks me up every time.

If you get a chance, check out all of Mark’s fine work and support his creative genius.

In addition, I’d like to thank Phil Vischer, Phil Cooke, Mark Steele (also our congenial emcee), and Ben Arment for being phenomenal keynote speakers. The members of our panel—Scott Hodge, Cynthia Ware, Carlos Whittaker, Bobby Gruenewald, and Conway Edwards—were wonderful, too. Each our breakout speakers did a great job, so check out the entire list here. And I can’t forget our great sponsors, each of whom provides a valuable resource or service to the church.

Thanks to Brad and Adam from ChurchMediaDesign.tv for coordinating our live stream and doing some great interviews during Echo. Also, thanks to the team from ParaTweet for enabling us to integrate keynote speaker Q&A’s via Twitter. Last but not least, the entire team at Watermark Community Church went above and beyond the call of duty—they were the best hosts a conference could ask for.

In the coming weeks, I hope to do more detailed blog posts about some of the amazing people that helped make Echo happen. We’ll also post pictures and videos from this year’s event soon, so keep an eye out for those.

Thanks again for making Echo 2009 something special.

ECHO: What has it been like to represent an organization like iStockPhoto to church leaders?
TB: Its been such a great experience. I used iStock working in the church long before they asked me to come work for them so I knew what a good product it was and how useful I found it in accomplishing my creative goals for the church each week. So when they asked me to come on bored as an evangelist for them to the faith community I jumped at the chance. I like that I am an evangelist for iStock and not a salesperson. As an evangelist its my job to tell others about iStock and how much I love it and use it and to help them understand how it could help them do their job better.

ECHO: At Echo you’re going to talk about doing different kinds of creative work on a shoestring budget. Do you think a lot of people let a small or nonexistent budget scare them away from trying to create quality media?
TB: Yeah I think sometimes they think that it requires a big budget to do anything really great but today its just not true. Are there some things that are impossible? Sure, but you can do more these days with little or no budget than you think you can. Typically, it simply requires some resourcefulness on your part and often times just a lot of time. There are so many resources out there today that are cheap or free and we are going to spend our time talking about what those resources are and how to use them to create awesomeness.

ECHO: Is there anything (video production, for example) that it’s best to avoid if you’re on a shoestring budget? In other words, should you forgo a certain medium in favor of other media if money is tight?
TB: I don’t think video production needs to be avoided on a small budget but there are issues that come with trying to do video on a tight budget and that’s one of the topics we will discuss. Basically there are techniques that can be used to make videos look great without spending a lot of money and we will cover those in the session.
Having little or no budget does require that you prioritize those things you wish to accomplish because you can’t always do everything you want so you have to try and get done those things you want most. Because of that you may decide that video production either eats too much of the allotted budget and crowds out too many other things or that it’s not as important as other projects. Either way on  shoestring budgets, often video is more rare than in churches that have more to work with.