What I Do

One of the creative jobs I have is designing the slides for supporting our senior pastor during his message. Lately, I've felt like I'm in a bit of a rut. My graphics have been nice, but not as creative and eye catching as I might want. The first thing I do is look what the message series is going to be about. I then work with Julie Fike, Pastor Tim's administrative assistant. She helps design the look of the program and the CD covers so we work together on the look of his slides to be sure we are consistent.

Today we finished up a series called ReKindle. This is the original design I came up with and we used for the Saturday service...


After the first Saturday service, our Magnification Team met with Tim to discuss the service and one of the things we decided to do was to tweak the look of the slide. The message series is called ReKindle so the look we were going for was the embers of a fire that had burned down. This first slide, while it had the general look, just was not quite what I wanted. So I stayed late on Saturday and came up with this...

This was much better so I changed all the slides for Sunday and felt it was much more creative.

But, the following week, we still weren't happy with the creativity of the message, so I spent a few hours working on some other ideas. We wanted to have the slides animate on and off instead of just being static. Here an example of what I came up with...


As you can see, it animates on but still keeps the general look of the previous week. I added an extra layer of coals as well as a layer of glow. Look carefully and you can see that it looks like the coals are just slightly glowing. I used several different animations depending on whether I was bringing in a fill in answer, quote/definition or scriputure.
I use Photoshop CS2 on my mac and Photoshop 7 on my PC. It will vary as to which one I use depending on what all I'm working on. For the final version of ReKindle, I created the background layer using Photoshop CS2. I used LiveType to create the graphics with the animations. I dragged these files onto a timeline in Final Cut Pro and exported them out as avi files to use on the INCA machine.

All in all, a nice creative look, but a lot more work than plain graphics.