Dan Merchant (pictured above, dressed as Bumper Sticker Man) is one of the Echo 2010 keynote speakers, and we couldn’t be more excited about having him. If case you’re not familiar with Dan, I want to point out a few ways you can get to know him:

• • His movie, Lord, Save Us from Your Followers, is returning to theaters next week.
• • The Lord, Save Us DVD comes out in April.
• • A few months ago, I interviewed him in COLLIDE.
• • Video! Check out clips from the movie here and watch Dan interviewed on TBN below:

So, that’s Dan Merchant. Register for Echo 2010 and make your way to Dallas to hear him live.

We hope to see you there!

If you ask me (not that you did), we launched with a pretty nice lineup of keynote speakers and breakout teachers. However, the breakout teachers lineup is incomplete — we’re going to be adding to it non-stop over the next few months. Case in point, we added three people today (Matt Knisely, Nathan Davis, and David Womack). There are already a few more that we’re going to add next week. You get the idea.

All that to say, keep an eye on our Speakers page, this blog, and our Twitter account for the latest on the ever-expanding Echo lineup. Oh, and when you’re ready to add yourself to the (unpublished) list of Echo attendees, you can do that here.

We hope you think the new site is pretty, but more than that, we hope you’ll check out all of the Echo 2010 information. You can get started on the Details page or on the Speakers page. Then, when you’re ready, you can register for Echo 2010 here.

Happy browsing!

If you pre-ordered a 2009 Echo DVD set, your order has been shipped. For everybody else, now’s the time to grab your set. As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, the DVD set includes some great stuff:

• Keynote Sessions from Ben Arment, Mark Steele, and Phil Cooke
• The Church Panel (featuring Carlos Whittaker, Bobby Gruenewald, Scott Hodge, Cynthia Ware, and Conway Edwards)
• The After Effects User Group
• Breakout Session MP3s
• Breakout Session PDFs
• 8 Motion Graphics Tutorials by Barton Damer and Trent Armstrong

Head over to the Echo Store to order yours.

•  Keynote Sessions from Ben Arment, Mark Steele, and Phil COoke
•  The Church Panel
•  The After Effects User Group
•  Breakout Session MP3s
•  Breakout Session PDFs
•  8 Motion Graphics Tutorials

Just for fun, we’re including a sample of the Motion Graphics Tutorials here for free. From Designer and Animator Barton Damer, we have the first of his series on building a logo animation from Illustrator to After Effects and Cinema 4D.

Next up, Motion Designer Trent Armstrong take this first session to walk through turning a still graphic into a loop— or two.

Echo 2009 DVD Sets will ship out in two weeks, so pre-order yours today.

We’re very grateful to Brad and Adam (also from CMD) for running the live stream during Echo. Brad and Adam had a great setup, conducted some interviews, and even facilitated the stream of our panel discussion. Plus, they drove all the way from Michigan to help us out. Brad also taught a breakout and helped with the After Effects User Group, and we can’t thank him enough for everything.

Check out ChurchMediaDesign.tv today.

Echo attendee surveys are coming in and one of the things that people really seemed to enjoy was the Q&A we did with each of our keynotes after their talks. To facilitate our Q&As we asked for audience questions via Twitter and then we sorted through them and displayed them on the auditorium screens. Thankfully, our friends at ParaTweet have a great product that’s really easy to use for this sort of thing.

Just as it did at the Catalyst events of the past year, ParaTweet took audience participation and interactivity to the next level at Echo. When I moderated the church panel at Echo, I remember feeling so relieved to see excellent questions pouring in via Twitter and displayed via ParaTweet. Frankly, I relied pretty heavily on ParaTweet because our audience’s questions were much better than mine. Plus, the ParaTweet moderation and filtering features ensured that no obscene Twitter spam ended up on our screens. That would’ve been embarrassing. (If anything obscene was going to end up on our screens, we wanted it to be intentional and to be our idea. Kidding.)

If you’ve got a live event coming up and you’re looking to facilitate some interaction via Twitter, check out ParaTweet.

This entry was originally posted on the COLLIDE blog. 

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.