Creating the Church Building Layout

One of the new features in our church website will be a layout of the church. The idea is to familiarize visitors with the property before they have even been there. So many times a new visitor sees only the sanctuary and perhaps a hallway or two. We want to show that there is so much more church than just an hour on Sunday morning. I am designing the layout so that when you click on an area of the layout an actual picture of the room will come up. And of course each room picture will have people in them. For a church is the people and not the building.

To accomplish this project, measurements of the church have been taken and entered into a new program for room design. I choose "Home Design and Landscaping Design" by Punch! software purchased at Target for $40. A very user friendly program but extremely difficult to install. Finally in desperation I opened my computer into safe mode, disengaged the UAC in the control panel and it loaded just fine. This program will be useful for more than just this website. Our session in approving five large stain glass windows for our sanctuary. With this program I can now put together a rendition of the completed project to help with the fundraising.

On Editing Video Clips

Learning to operate a video recorder has been fun and very frustrating at the same time. The children at the church have begun to run from my presence when they see the camera come out. At least that was until I figured out how to upload videos to YouTube. Now when they see me coming they are anxious to be caught on video, knowing that it will soon be posted online.

The videos from Burnt Church can be found easily on YouTube if you search for "Burnt Church Winchester". I have loaded my must current video with this blog.

A great improvement to my videos is the editing. With the first few videos I was only able to upload exactly what I had recorded. I searched for a decent video program and I found one in "Family Movie Creator" It is also know as "Movies on DVD 7" by Magix. The best deal I found was from Target for $20.00. This has changed everything. I can now record many segments of an event and later string them together, complete with effects and text.

As far as serving the church, it has been very effective. The children are more involved in events, parents are proud and grandparents are being instructed on how they can see their grandchildren at church on the Internet.