Echo Conference

One of the people who played an integral role in Echo was our Master of Ceremonies and keynote speaker Mark Steele.

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.

Tiffani Barnes has spent 14 years in small church ministry with no staff and zero budget, so she knows what its like to have to create something from virtually nothing. These days she travels the country as the Education and Faith Evangelist for iStockphoto.com, does freelance writing, designing and video editing when she’s home, and works for a national AVL integration firm in Nashville, TN.

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.

One of the things we’re most excited about for this year’s Echo experience is our panel discussion featuring Bobby Gruenewald, Carlos Whittaker, Conway Edwards, Cynthia Ware, and Scott Hodge. The panel will be a free-flowing conversation that covers current and future trends in the intersection of media, technology, and the Church. Each of these leaders has a unique and valuable perspective to share, and we’re looking forward to hearing what they have to say. The panel will be moderated by Scott McClellan from COLLIDE Magazine (but he promises to stay out of the way and let the panel do most of the talking).

If you have questions for the panel, come on out to Echo and we’ll try to incorporate some audience questions via Twitter.

Shawn Wood sat down this morning with Scott McClellan, editor of COLLIDE Magazine, for a chat via Skype. They talked about his role as Experiences Pastor at Seacoast Church, his upcoming breakout at Echo–”The Proper Care and Feeding of Artists”–and his new book, Wasabi Gospel.  We are thrilled to have Shawn speaking at Echo so check out the video!

Storme Wood is a ten year veteran of producing and using video to reach, teach, entertain and inform churches, businesses and individuals. He worked as a full time Media Director for Gateway Church in Austin TX and co-founded the church media production company eleven72.

ECHO: How did get into video production and learn the ropes?
SW: The first step in my journey was studying for a Radio Television Film degree at the University of Texas. I started taking production classes, getting to check out cameras, shooting documentaries for class projects, learning to edit old school by actually cutting film and editing tape deck to deck. I also volunteered and got involved with a local experimental film group that was shooting Super 8 films at the time. So I was beginning to learn, to experiment, to figure things out by getting my hands dirty. About that time, I started going to a little start up church called Gateway. I was at a church BBQ one day and the Associate Pastor, Ted Beasley, struck up a conversation with me. When he learned I was a film school student, he got really excited about us doing videos for the church. So, over the next few years, I made films for film school, experimental films for the Cinemaker Coop and short videos and multimedias for Gateway Community Church here in Austin. And that’s how I got started.

ECHO: What kinds of things can Echo attendees expect to learn in your breakout session, Church Video Tips and Tricks?
SW: I plan on keeping things really practical at my session. We’re going to talk about basic things you can do with the camera, with the lights, with audio, with editing to get solid results. These will be tips and tricks I’ve picked up from slogging it out in production for the last ten years. What can you do to get better footage for your videos? What can you do to shoot better interviews? What can you do to make your edits have more power and impact? These are the things I’m going to talk about. And I’m going to talk in terms that can be easily understood and easily put into practice.

ECHO: What were some of the challenges you faced while creating church media resources at eleven72? What was the most rewarding part about creating those resources for local churches?
SW: Some of our biggest challenges at eleven72 were creating really good, useful, on point videos on a budget. We had to be really creative in distributing our resources so that we could produce short films and videos that had the production value and quality of story, acting, etc, that people in our culture expect and that we could feel good about.
The most rewarding part about creating video resources for local churches is knowing that your videos get to play a part in that awesome Sunday experience in hundreds of churches; That you were able to help them pull off their service, to help a pastor make his point, or to give a congregation pause to laugh or think about a particular subject. That your videos are a part of the process that God is using to draw people to Himself, that’s the greatest reward (and honestly quite humbling). It’s also really fun when you run into people who saw one of your videos or when you have relatives call and say that their church used one of your videos or when you see that someone in the Philippines or in Uzbekistan or South Korea downloaded one of your videos and to kind of have your mind blown by the fact that your videos are being shown in churches all over the world.