God On Film — Teaser from Jesse on Vimeo.

Here’s the teaser video for eastlake Community Church’s current sermon series God On Film. It’s a 60 second cut from all the other videos.

The audio is taken from Skillet’s “Forsaken” from their Collide album. Stretching its short instrumental breaks into 60 seconds with no lyrics was somewhat of a challenge, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

AT&T is merely pushing this to counter negative press, which most likely will work. Profit over customer satisfaction after all?*

* I do know how subsidies work, and technically it is a loan… but still, I thought AT&T was going to take a higher road the same way Apple did in a similar situation.

ORIGINAL:
Kudos to AT&T for choosing customer satisfaction over profit.

All of that said, we’ve been listening to our customers. And since many of our iPhone 3G customers are early adopters and literally weeks shy of being upgrade eligible due to iPhone 3G S launching 11 months after iPhone 3G, we’re extending the window of upgrade eligibility for a limited time.

We’re now pleased to offer our iPhone 3G customers who are upgrade eligible in July, August or September 2009 our best upgrade pricing, beginning Thursday, June 18.

God On Film (Week 4): “Moon” – Our Search For Identity from Jesse on Vimeo.

Here’s week 4 of a series of videos I did for Eastlake Community Church for an upcoming sermon series God On Film. Each week focuses on a different topic taken from one of this summer’s films.

This one just happens to be my favorite, all the other intros are similar in style just using different clips of course.

The audio is taken from Skillet’s “Forsaken” from their Collide album.

Easy to fix in more advanced software, it’s a little bit less obvious in iMovie. I did a bit of searching and trial & error before discovering this simple method for converting left channel only audio into true mono (i.e. filling both channels).

The quick method is simply to select “mono” in quicktime settings when exporting from iMovie, but what if you have stereo music or other sound that you don’t want to lose the information for?

This method uses Quicktime Pro ($20) to solve the problem and “FIX IT.”

In iMovie right-click (or control-click) the video you’ve imported and select Reveal In Finder to find the source video. Open this source video file in Quicktime and select Window > Show Movie Properties (Cmd + J).

Select Sound Track in the top list, then select Audio Settings on the set of tabs. In the list to the right simply select Mono for both channels.

Save this file and re-import it into iMovie (or whatever video editing software you’re using) and boom, now your video will work and you can still use regular stereo music or whatever other audio within your file.

Eastlake Logo Reveal from Jesse on Vimeo.

A logo reveal I did for Eastlake Community Church. Inspired by Simon Bronson fantastic “Make Form Cinematic” tutorial.

There’s no sound as it will mostly be played during filler video before and after the services when other music is playing.

Sean Sperte just unveiled a newly redesigned Geek & Mild. Once again Sean shows off how gorgeous minimalist design can be.

I love the clean re-branding with the simple (but beautiful) ampersand that connects the name together.

You might notice there is no navigation bar… or really any navigation at all. If you are looking for the archives, hover over the binding on the right side — and the about page is simply listed in the footer.

My only complaint is the favicon — it has ugly white jaggies when not viewed on a white background (i.e. when using the Safari plugin Glims tab label favicons)… though most people won’t see this since all browsers default displaying the favicon on white.

Other than that very minor detail, the new Geek & Mild is a fantastic redesign.

As a creative, I pride myself on my work and desperately crave for others to tell me that I am great and for my creations to spawn success, fame, wealth, and respect.

I want to design the best website ever – to be featured on all of the best CSS Gallery websites, be mentioned in a magazine or even just referenced in a Smashing Magazine or A List Apart article, see a huge jump in my web and RSS stats, or even just see a substantial increase in the number of comments my posts get. I want to create the kind of motion graphics that go viral, links posted on every website talking about my great creation, motion artists asking how I achieved certain aspects of the work, impressed with my creation.

With my venture into photography I want other to tell me what a natural talent I have, how I’m going to go places and should be taking photos of celebrities, or even that I should charge for it and make a business of it. I want to have genius ideas for how to create a passive income online – creating small niche websites that are useful for readers/viewers and also generate income, to create content or products that people want to buy and continue to do so, to build a brand of my own accomplishments.

I have not and will not achieve many of these things I desire. Even if I were to create that website that was universally loved, I would still be caught up on the fact that I haven’t gotten any comments on Flickr for my latest piece of photography.

As I notice the accomplishments of my friends and colleagues, however, I do not see the things that are not working… I only see how their incredible successes and beautiful creations are so much better than mine.

This leads to envy.

Envy

This weekend my pastor (Eastlake Community Church) taught on envy, and how it kills our relationships and our friendships.

“Then I observed that most people are motivated to success by their envy of their neighbors. But this, too, is meaningless, like chasing the wind.”

— Ecclesiastes 4:4

In dealing with this envy we were encouraged to:

1. Admit our struggles with envy
2. Apologize to God for it
3. Practice celebrating others (rather than being envious of them).

As the main source of my envy exists in this online social world, I thought it best to exercise step 3 here on Echo Faith. Over the next few weeks I plan on highlighting some of the amazing creatives that I know online and featuring some of their amazing creations. Hopefully, I can get some small interviews with some of them and find out who they are amazed by and would choose to celebrate.

Stay tuned.

Great insight by comedian Louis CK on late Night With Conan O’Brien.

When you ran out of money you would just go “Well, I can’t do any more things now…”

Faith Adams, daughter of my friends Peter and Bree.

Experimenting with texture techniques.