Living Open Source» Video

The LifePixels vimeo channel

Tim — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:17:48 +0000

Which is the best video sharing site? No contest – it is vimeo. And now there is a vimeo channel dedicated to videos that inspire living the Jesus way.

vimeo is a community based video sharing site that encourages collaboration and creativity. It is a much friendlier and a significantly more creative community than the likes of YouTube. Since I first discovered vimeo, I have been taking particular note of those videos that inspire living the Jesus way – motion graphics, modern parables and real-life stories that help reflect on what it might mean to be a disciple of Jesus today. So to keep it all tidy, I started a new vimeo channel called LifePixels.

One my latest finds was this parable about finding the perfect church by KORE.

Jonah on YouTube

Tim — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:46:46 +0000

I‘m not preaching the lectionary this week, as I’m preaching away from home. I thought I’d use the story of Jonah for which there seem to be endless animated versions of the story, like this one.

Christ Community Church in Omaha, NE have produced a set of great animations of the story which can be found on good old YouTube. Here is the first in the series.

Do Penguins Fly?

Tim — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:15:24 +0000

Sifting through the meaningless and profound fog that is called YouTube, you’ll find some very cool animated short films. Do Penguins Fly? has been around a while, but having dug it out to show our youth group, I thought I’d share it here. We are thinking about how we know God exists this evening…

You can also check my animated 3D short play list on YouTube. The Last Knit is a great one to show your Ladies Fellowship at church!

All who are thirsty

Tim — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:23:53 +0000

A bit late for last week’s lectionary, but I put together this little visual meditation on Isaiah 55:1-2 for last Sunday.

Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
Features music by Voiker Fullcarp

In case you are interested:

I guess this is also a simple example of how Creative Commons allows for sharing of creative works. The music is from Jamendo, already licensed under cc, as long as my video is shared in the same way! My original version featured the song All Who Are Thirsty by that famous Christian songwriter whose name escapes me. But as he didn’t release his song under CC, I can’t use it without writing to him and paying him lots of money!

Using video clips in church

Tim — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:25:14 +0000

To use excerpts from videos in church usually requires you to buy a license, which in my humble opinion is ridiculous. Then there is the whole problem with queuing up the DVD to play and finding you’ve got it in the wrong place and instead of showing the desired clip, you show something highly unsuitable for a sensitive congregation! That is until I came across WingClips, a service that offers a huge collection of ready extracted clips from top movies, all ready to go with permission granted for use in church.

WingClips has a searchable database of movie clips that can be used to illustrate a whole range of themes. Clips can be up to 4 minutes in length and can be downloaded in medium or high resolution formats. The medium resolution downloads are free and are adequate to get a point across in a smaller venue. You do have to subscribe to download, but unless you need the higher resolution versions you won’t need the premium service.

All the clips WingClips have sourced can be used “only and solely for the purpose of illustrating sermon messages and/or teachings during free public religious services and/or teaching presentations” – so no need for the video license they keep trying to sell you!

You might think that this means all the clips are from films nobody has heard of. But you would be wrong. I just downloaded a clip from Evan Almighty to use on Sunday, and this week’s featured downloads come from WALL-E.

With the themed index you can quickly locate suitable clips for your message, and you don’t even have to worry about finding and queuing up the clip to play from a DVD.

Visit the WingClips home page

Open Source Software:– Storyboard your next AV with Celtx?

Tim — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 09:38:23 +0000

Celtx aims to be a fully integrated solution for media pre-production and collaboration. If you have an idea for a story, movie or play then Celtx is designed to help you develop ideas of plot, scene and characters. You can use it to storyboard a project and collaborate with others too. It can help you organise a project, gathering images, sounds, clips into one place to work into an idea. There is also the Celtx Project Central site which allows Celtx users to access an on-line community where collaboration and sharing of work is possible.

I really like this concept and the software seems pretty cool, but you may wonder what it has to offer churches given that this is a series on Open Source software for church use! Well, clearly if you are into producing your own drama scripts or audio-visuals then this may help bring some organisation to your work. You might even find this tool works well for working on services and even sermons! It would also be interesting to explore the collaboration aspects. There have been a number of examples of collaborative, open source films and other media productions recently. Celtx’s own Project Central aims to encourage such work. It would be great to see a bunch of Christians put their heads together to produce some amazing media projects.

In fact I did find a couple (and only a couple!) of embryonic Christian projects on Project Central that seem to head in that kind of direction. For example, I found this project that is for producing a series of DVDs introducing the Christian faith for young people. It doesn’t look like the project came to anything as it is unfinished, but is a good example of the kind of thing that Celtx is intended for.

So, is anybody up for working on an Open Source Alpha or a series of alternative parable scripts or some new life changing youth teaching materials?

The end of the slideshow

Tim — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 15:45:39 +0000

Grab a few images, put them together with artistic, professional looking video effects, a touch of subtle background music and publish in a video format. All in under 5 minutes? No this is not a tutorial, in fact you don’t need to know anything about video, music or such things. If you have a bunch of images, just throw them at Animoto and it does it all for you! This is really is quite neat.

It took me longer to write this post than produce this video!

Honestly, this video took a couple of minutes to produce. I had the images already in a folder on my pc. The tool can also grab images from Flickr or Facebook or one of a number of photo hosting tools. I then chose one of Animoto’s music tracks, hit continue and out popped this video. It took me longer to write this post than produce this video!

I could see this being a very useful tool for worship leaders. Think of your theme for Sunday, grab some free images or your own photos to fit, go to Animoto, ten minutes before you leave for church and it will look like you’ve been up all night on this one.

Go and make your own at Animoto. A worship background video with no tears or late nights.

Leopard vs Goat

Tim — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 10:52:13 +0000

The lectionary continues with Isaiah’s word pictures (Isaiah 11:1-10) imagining the coming of God.

“The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat” (Isaiah 11:6)

Who better than Sir David Attenborough to provide the background on this one? Here he is on a BBC documentary showing a snow leopard chasing a mountain goat.

This time the goat got away.