Tag: Mad Skillz

Mad Skillz: Dave on regional ministry

Dave Walker is the boss of AFES in Townsville. Or the “executive pastor”. Really he’s just the senior staff worker. He has been in North Queensland for nine years. He has, on occasion, blogged here. He is so skilled that he has actually made two submissions to this program.

Dave is, of course, an “expert” in regional ministry and this input is so timely one might assume I asked him to write it.

Here are his tips.

  1. Keep heaven, hell, the bible and the gospel clearly in focus. Soon, no one’s going to care where they lived here.
  2. Be content for your gifts to be used less than they could be, or for your reputation to be smaller than it might be — for the sake of loving people. (And if that feels too hard, then think of your wife’s pattern of life raising children. Or Jesus. Either’s fine.)
  3. If God enables you, have children and grandchildren – spiritually. Most regional places suffer because there are no evangelical grandparents, ministers who have stuck around in the area for a generation or two. They don’t stick around because it’s hard, and often it’s right they move on. I’m guessing, though, (I’m only 9 years in!) that persuading other people to stay and minister with or near you is a key to going long term. (But if it is time to go to the big smoke, then do it!)
  4. Grow up. It’s lovely having some older, senior leader around to tell you that what you’re doing is great, or where you should go next, or that you’re ‘really needed’ where you are. But it’s a luxury, and God may put you somewhere where you don’t have that kind of leadership around. (And if I can facetiously slip in a corollary: Don’t stay in Sydney just because Phillip says you’re needed there!)
  5. Live in a nice house, where possible. This is pure pragmatism, and fraught with danger. But it helps.

February 17, 2010

Mad Skillz: Simone on supply teaching

Simone is married to Andrew. Together they are my boss. Kind of. In that I am currently a student minister at their church. At the moment I feel like Hebrew is my master.

Simone writes songs of goodness and blogs deeply and often at Another Something. When I first started blogging I had a template that featured white text on black. Simone told me it was too hard to read. I changed it. She stopped reading. She started again a while back.

When Simone is not writing songs, children’s material or soppy poems to her husband she is a supply teacher. Here’s what she has to say about Supply teaching.

I have one of the best jobs in the world. A job that makes me a nice pocketful of money, that is strictly school hours, and gives me the flexibility to work or not to work on any particular day. On top of this, it (often) takes little emotional energy, gives me the chance to contribute something nice to the world, and is (mostly) fun.

I am a supply teacher. I’ve been supplying for over two years now, and I’ve developed some mad skilz in my area. Let me share.

My top 5 tips for being a good supply teacher

  1. Don’t be a nuisance to the school. Schools are busy places. Get in there and do your job. Take responsibility for your kids and try to have things run as smoothly as they would if the teacher you’re replacing was there. And don’t whinge if you have to do an extra playground duty. You are getting paid more than any other staff member and really have nothing else to do. Leave the classroom tidy.
  2. Make the kids come into the room well. Have them line up over and over again if you need to. Once they are quiet, move to number 3.
  3. Bribe the kids with fun and semi-educational activities. At the start of the day, write all your incentive activities on the board. Tell the kids that you’d love this to be a great day and if they get through their work, they’ll get to do some of these fun things. Promise them obstacles courses outside, sport, art, anything – but be positive. With you there, there is the opportunity for an unusually excellent day. (If I have to teach a P-3 class, I take in a piece of ‘lovely lycra’ and a few teddies. There is almost nothing younger kids won’t do for you if you promise them a chance to bounce bears on a trampoline! Make them count in 2s or 3s while you bounce the teddies and it becomes a maths game!)
  4. If the teacher leaves you no work, be thankful! You have 5 hours to teach the kids whatever you want. Pull out your favourite stories (Roald Dahl is always good), read to them for a very long time, then make up some creative writing or art or maths or SOSE activities around your reading. Play with character transformations (‘If the enormous crocodile was a person, what would he look like? What would he do?) or points of view (re-write parts of ‘the Enormous Crocodile’ in a voice sympathetic to the EC). Turn it into a comic, with or without text. Make up maths word problems based on the story. Research the diet of crocodiles… Endless options, and they all take little or no preparation. If you are not tied to any program, you are free! Make the most of it! (If work is left, do it! And thank the teacher.)
  5. Show the kids that you like them. This goes a long way. (If they are not very likeable, this one will be hard. But try.)

And finally, don’t stress. Whatever happens, it will all be over at 3 o’clock.

February 17, 2010

Mad Skillz: Amy on Graphic Design

Amy and Tim are an almost completely unstereotypical highschool romance. I believe Tim once told Amy he would never be interested in her. Or something. I was at school with them – on the sidelines – watching as this resolve disappeared. There are many areas Amy and I disagree on – these probably trace back to sharing so many subjects in high school, where I was no doubt incredibly annoying, and our different personality types. But she is also very intelligent and a worthy foe (though she takes arguments personally) and has (more often than I care to admit) along with the West Wing dragged me to the left more than anybody else.

Despite getting a letter about how good her writing was in Queensland’s Core Skills Test she studied graphic design and now works for the propaganda machine that is the Queensland Government (in a pretty cool and wildly popular area where the propaganda is deserved). Here are her tips on Graphic Design.

While at night, obviously, I am a secretive caped crime fighter, I still need to eat, so by day I’m a graphic designer. Apparently this sounds impressive but I can tell you that if there is glamour and big bucks I must have missed the memo.Saying that, graphic design allows me to be both creative and paid, which is pretty good for an art college graduate (she jokes, mostly).

Pretty much everything you see around you in modern life has been designed by someone – that book you’re reading, your yoghurt packaging, that brochure you picked up. From day to day I’ll work on flyers, logos, signage, posters – with the occasional illustration job or ‘wrinkle-smoothing’ photo manipulation. And while you might think that my job is pretty shallow, just making things look ‘pretty’, good design is about clear communication. Graphic design, if you will, is the visual equivalent of the speech read with verve and passion, rather than a boring monotone.

Graphic Design makes your message clear and accessible.

Most of you aren’t going to be pulling together books and brochures, but all of you will be pulling together some sort of document that could benefit from a few tips and hints to make your message clearer. So, here’s my design 101 course…

  1. Restrain yourself…
    No, not with ropes. This is what I call the ‘no visual vomit’ rule. It is all about not overloading the viewer with 50,000 messages all at once – keeping it simple.

    You know those fantastic fonts you just downloaded from the net? – resist the urge to use all of them in your church newsletter. Pick 2 fonts per document, 3 at most – 1 for all the body copy, and another for your headings (that third one could be for a super special event, or pull-out text that you particularly want to highlight). Resist the urge to fill up all the space available – white space is good, it lets it all breathe and keeps the focus. Don’t go overboard on the colour – we don’t need the Rainbow Express. This approach means your document looks deliberate and consistent, not just a mess of stuff all put together.

  2. Balance
    Think of the page like a see-saw – you don’t want a whole lot of heavy stuff on one side and nothing much on the other. Try and get things to visually balance with each other.
  3. Avoid the amateur cliche tick-boxes
    These are (in no particular order): Comic Sans (just don’t, please) or any of the ‘special’ fonts in word, WordArt, starbursts, rainbow gradients, clip art (I know that this is hard, but with so many sources of good quality free material out there, clip art is a disservice – I have included some links below). If you see it in one of those shouty ads on TV, don’t go there.
  4. Don’t steal
    When I talk about free material above, I am not saying go to google images and just nick off with what you find there. You know… ‘you wouldn’t steal a handbag…’ – well don’t steal someone’s layout or photos or font. Stealing online is still stealing, and I’m pretty sure there is a commandment about that. There are lots of resources online that have ‘free for personal use’ arrangements or creative commons images that you can use with a credit (see below).
  5. Call in the experts
    It can be a little too easy to think that anybody can design something nowadays, but sometimes you really are better off calling in the professionals. Design is a skill, usually the product of years of study and then on-the-job training and involves a huge amount of industry knowledge that will save you time and money. It might seem simpler for your nephew to rig up an awesome logo for you in word, but a designer can show you why you should keep it to two colours, have it ready in different formats, how it would work on different mediums, and how it needs to be set up so it doesn’t print like a big pixelly mess. Otherwise, trust me on this, when you show up at a print shop with that fabulous logo in Word – they are laughing at you behind your back. And then overcharging you.

So there you have it – a crash course in design 101. If you take nothing else away from this I hope at least you agree that Comic Sans should be wiped from the face of the earth. For everyone’s sake.

The End.

Some handy links…

  • www.dafont.com (Lots of free fonts – just check the licence agreements for if they are personal or commercial use)
  • www.fontsquirrel.com (More free fonts – these are all okay for commercial use)
  • www.sxc.hu (online photo resource – you need to sign up but there is a lot of good stuff here. Check the licence agreement before using it and don’t get tricked into clicking through to their paid site which appears at the top of each search result page)
  • www.flickr.com/creativecommons (read the rules first, but this gives you a huge resource of great images that you can use, usually just with a credit acknowledgement)

February 16, 2010

Mad Skillz: Andrew on appreciating opera

My friend Andrew is a fully sick opera singer. He’s not going to teach you how to be a fully sick opera singer – instead, he wants to foster a greater appreciation of the arts in the readers of this relatively low brow blog.

Andrew and I were part of the world’s most inappropriately named “beach mission” on the Tweed River. He has the honour of having a cafe in Toowoomba named after him. That’s inspirational and aspirational stuff. Here’s what Andrew has to say about appreciating opera.

I think opera is the greatest art-form. To be fair, when it’s not sogreat, it can be awful, but when it’s good, there’s nothing like it. (As far as I can tell, the voice is the only the instrument created before the fall, which explains a lot).

Thankfully I moved on from a childhood love of Andrew Lloyd Webber after beginning singing lessons during high-school, and discovered Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, and then the operas of Mozart. I spent 9 years as a uni student studying singing, in Toowoomba, Sydney and London, before landing my first gig, in the Opera Studio of the Staatstheater Nürnberg.

The stereotypes of opera and opera singers are generally not true, and they should not put you off exploring opera. So here are my five tips for the uninitiated:

  1. Go and see some live opera (I mean a staged one, not some wanna-be popera singer) – and as Rollando Villazon said, you don’t just read one poem and decide you don’t like poetry, so try a few.
  2. If you’ve not really seen any opera before, try some of the more popular ones to get started – to get your ear ‘in’, my suggestions would be: ‘The Magic Flute’ or ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ both by Mozart, ‘La Bohéme’ by Puccini, ‘La Traviata’ by Verdi or Bizet’s ‘Carmen’.
  3. Most places will either sing in English or have the surtitles (personally I prefer original language with surtitles) so understanding should not be a problem, but you might want to read upon the story on Wikipedia before you go.
  4. There’s no need to dress up, though you can if you want to. I went to the Royal Opera House in sneakers and jeans all the time (though Germany is a little more conservative).
  5. If you’re a student, or under 30, there are some really great deals on tickets to be found. Some theatres, like the ROH do day tickets which you can line up for, and if you get in early enough, havetickets from 7GBP. While there are expensive seats, it’s a myth that opera is only for the rich. Don’t forget to keep an eye on the student productions at the conservatories, where excellent young singers and fresh, energetic productions can often be seen for about the price of a movie ticket. Many of the major opera houses also do free performances in the park or big-screen relays in the summer.

So I why not dip your toes in the water of opera – it’s good once you’re in!

February 16, 2010

Mad Skillz: Ben on how to create an animation storyboard

Ben is one of my favourite bloggers. He’s also probably my favourite e-friend. I’ve never met him in the real world but his blog is grand and his comments elsewhere are open, honest and full of goodness. Ben drew the little logo on the top right of my page. I’m eternally grateful to him for that.

Ben lives in Sydney with the vowels E, e, and i. His blog is full of the goodness of Proverbs, Peanuts, a weekly quiz and reflections on life in Sydney. As well as the occasional piece of art, cultural review and insight into Ben’s struggles. It’s like a Snuggie (the wearable blanket not the nappy).

Did you know that Ben is an animator? Cool huh. From what I can gather he works on children’s cartoons. But I might be wrong. There was a time when his inimitable Monday Quiz was accompanied by a weekly cartoon. Like this one.

The key to good animation – or in fact good crafting of any production – is storyboarding. And that is where Ben has chosen to share his expertise as part of “Mad Skillz Week”… I emailed some people last week asking them to contribute (and I thought I’d posted this invitation the other day – but I couldn’t find it when I went looking).

I work in animation, mostly doing storyboards for kids TV cartoons. A storyboard is like a rough laying out of an episode, using a script and soundtrack as the guide. It shows visually how the story will go, and will set up all the required shots. From there it gets into all the laborious gruntwork of actually animating all this– something that I aspire to never have to do myself. Here’s a few things that I’ve learnt the hard way over the years.

  1. Learn how to tell a story. Learning to draw is pretty important too, but there are plenty of good drawers who can’t tell a story visually. And there are rubbish drawers who can tell awesome stories.
  2. Watch movies. Not necessarily animated ones, just movies full stop. This is really the way that you work out how people string together a bunch of different shots and scenes to make a narrative.
  3. Don’t watch new movies. They’re bog. It’s all about flash and dazzle, and a million cuts and camera angles, which mostly just leave the viewer confused, seasick and a little traumatised. These techniques are great ways of disguising the fact that your story telling is rubbish and plot is threadbare. As they say in the industry, you cant polish a turd (editor’s note – Ben had removed the “u” because he’s gentlemanly – but I didn’t want it to look like I was censoring him).
  4. Watch old movies. They’re awesome. What they had to work with was limited, so they really had to think. There was no, ‘oh, we’ll just make that CGI’. Also they were often working with black and white, so they had to work hard on each shot, to make sure what needed to be ‘read’ in the shot could be done so immediately (for example, if you want something dark to be seen, put it in front of white, don’t bury it in a busy background). Hitchcock is a great place to start.
  5. Have as few shots as possible. It’s not clever to move the ‘camera’ around all the time, making tricky, edgy compositions. The priority is that the viewer knows what the heck is going on. Work out an establishing, wide shot to show the environment and where the characters are in relation to each other. From there, just cut in for close-ups and mid-shots. This requires more planning, but means much less work for everybody else down the line, including the viewer.

Follow these 5 tips, and you will soar to realms you dared not ponder in your wildest dreams.

There you have it. Thanks Ben. Anyone else interested in taking part in Mad Skillz Week should send me an email (nm dot campbell at gmail dot come).

February 15, 2010