it's so ghetto...

I love how pathetic-looking this sketch is.

I did it to explain to my business partner how I thought some potential black backdrop pieces--that need to be custom ordered--might work for use at THE WELL.

I've been working on a quote for a screen that'll be 11 x 6 feet (16:9 ratio--'cause we're film people dag-nabbit!) so that leaves roughly 43 feet or 22.5 feet per side (the room is 54 x 54) to cover in blacks.

I was writing the email and figured I'd just sketch the thing, scan it and send it to him.

This freaks me out a little to admit but I often find myself thinking these days, as I pursue various new ventures in film/TV and church planting, that almost none of what I do in a typical day would be possible without the internet.

Today I skype conferenced with my senior editor and his newest assistant (bringing the total to six editors working on this one series) in our Vancouver post-production space to talk him through the web editing side of the enterprise while all three of us simultaneously worked on the back-end engine of the site learning as we went.  Then a couple questions came up and we emailed the questions out while we skyped and IM'd url's and phone numbers back and forth at the same time.

It's astounding to me what we can do these days.

Then I hopped online to preview a screen, found one in Vancouver but dug a little deeper and found one right here in our hometown AND they've got a projector that'll work for HALF of what we were expecting.

Add to that some old fashioned connecting where I sat down with the lead pastor from one of the areas fastest growing churches--just to meet him and pick his brain a bit--and he ended up saying that they might be willing to help us out with our screen and projector, so I rushed home, emailed him and started looking for numbers keeping him apprised the whole time via email.

I'm continually struck by how much easier this church plant is--on the tactical/functional level--than it was last time.  I mean, I shudder when I remember what we spent on 'branding' and our website last time.  It's really a sick, disgusting number.  I didn't know enough at the time to know we were being taken to the cleaners.  Man, it's good to have aged and to have suffered some and learned some.

The day we launched the site we had 300 uniques--and I realize those are small numbers by any stretch--but that's 300 people who are interested enough in THE WELL to check it out.  Sure I don't know how many of them will end up local (or show up) but I was encouraged nonetheless.

Naturally at the end of the day it comes down to personal vision, ingenuity and passion.  You still have to do the work required to see your dream come true but, man, if we don't have some wonderful tools at our disposal that weren't a reality even ten years ago.

Pretty cool.

T