Monday, March 29, 2010

Set List for 03.28.10

10:45 a.m. Service
We Lift You Up - Jason Morant
How Great Thou Art - Charlie Hall
Beautiful Jesus - Kristian Stanfill
'Til I See You - Hillsong United
Everlasting God - Brenton Brown

Evening of Prayer and Worship - 6:30 p.m.
Everlasting God - Brenton Brown
How Great is Our God - Chris Tomlin
Jesus Messiah - Chris Tomlin
Doxology - David Crowder Band

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Punk Rock is "Contagious"

When I'm Ready


So for those who don't know, I was in a Punk Rock band during my high school years. It was a fun time. We called ourselves Contagious. At first, I'll admit, we were pretty terrible. But as we progressed as a band we came into our own. I've always regretted that the last several songs that we wrote didn't get recorded because they were some of our best material.

It all started when me and my best/life-long friend Chris Lee began to learn how to play the guitar. The Bible says that as iron sharpens iron so does one man sharpen another, and I think that applies to all areas of our lives, even learning the guitar and writing music. Looking back I think we pushed and challenged each other to get better. Soon drummer, Marc, and bassist, Matt, came into the picture and we had ourselves a band.

We soon came to the conclusion that in order to be a "real band" we needed to write our own music. So we did. And seeing how we were only 16 we wrote about the two most important things in our lives, Jesus and.......girls. The song above is called "When I'm Ready" it's kind of about both.

The biggest take away I had from my experience with Contagious was the bond, the brotherhood created within the context of a band. I think since then any band I've been apart of, worship related or not, I've tried to nurture that same aspect. Mainly because it's such an awesome thing to experience and be apart of(same goes for my River Hills musicians!)

The top picture was our promo with drummer, Marc, and below we have a picture of a concert we played on the beach-front with our second drummer, Patrick. Miss those days...

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Set List for 03.14.10

Sing to the King - Billy Foote
Nothing But the Blood - Brandt Farmer arrangement
Sing Sing Sing - Chris Tomlin
How Great is Our God - Chris Tomlin
We Bring You Praise - River Hills Worship
Glory to God Forever - Fee

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Warrior Poets Graphic Revealed

So Monday I finished up the graphic for the upcoming sermon series Warrior Poets: Biblical Manhood. I thought I'd share a little bit of my creative process with this particular graphic. Unfortunately, they don't come as easy as some may think. I had a screen writing professor in college compare an idea to a pile of crap with a golden nugget inside. Basically, you have to dig and sort through all the surrounding crap to get to the golden nugget. This process is very obvious in this particular graphic design.

The first image I thought of when I heard the phrase Warrior Poet was Mel Gibson's character from Braveheart. I like the vivid imagery of the blue war paint on his face. So I attempted to recreate that in a graphic. In my mind Warrior Poet is an oxymoron, so it needed an edge but also a softer, sensual quality. Usually 9 times out of 10, the first graphic is just there to work out the overall idea. Seen here, it's plainly a terrible graphic. Keep diggin' Brandt.



As I worked through this first I idea, I kept coming back to a western feel with Native American Indians. Shortly after that I had my "Ah Ha" moment and found my golden nugget in the shape of a feathered arrow(this only took me about a month). The warrior side would be an arrow and the poet side would be a fountain pen. Warrior. Poet. In turn as I designed the new graphic I moved from the western feel into more of a Frank Miller's 300, graphic novel type feel.



All in all I think it came out nicely, and a lot better than I could have expected. But isn't that how God works?