Okay, so first I’ll talk about last night’s events.
I crawled into bed at 11:30 figuring on 6 hours of sleep. After sleeping only 20 minutes, Lisa calls me to see if I was still awake and needed help with some parcels and Jonathan. A few minutes later, she walks in the door and says that it smells like smoke outside. We look and there appears to be smoke coming from the other building we caretake. Fortunately, no fire there, but there was a fire underneath a parking lot platform that is suspended over the riverbank. It appears that homeless people had dug out an area underneath and had been using it for shelter. The fire had taken up underneath and started to bite into the wooden beams that helped hold it in place (along with the concrete girders.)
Long story short… I buzz the caretake of that building, who couldn’t be bothered to roll out of bed to see what was going on. He’s the caretaker and there’s a fire that affects one of his buildings for crying out loud! Anyways, the firetrucks were already on their way, so I stuck around. They had to push the hose through the fence and I escorted one of their guys around the fence line and down through the trails along the riverbank in order to get to where he can attack the fire. There was no short way through the fence. Fire gets knocked out, I’m back in bed about 12:40am but it takes me more than a half hour to fall asleep. Great, I get a whopping 4.5 hours of sleep. I wanted to be sharp for the morning…
Why? Well let me tell you. Wednesday night and all day Thursday and Friday, (as well as Saturday evening and Sunday morning sessions.) the church we attend, Springs Church, (www.springs.ca) hosted a large conference for pastors and ministry leaders. We’ve got speakers from around the world coming out to give of their time and speak to and over the guests who themselves come from all over.
We had Willie George from Church on the Move in Tulsa, Oklahoma. (www.churchonthemove.com) Then Tommy Barnett from Phoenix First Assembly in Phoenix Arizona.(www.phoenixfirst.org) Tommy is also the senior pastor behind the LA Dream center, a large outreach center in the heart of inner city Los Angeles.
We also brought in International Evangelist Reinhard Bonnke. (www.cfan.org) He has been leading massive Gospel Crusades in Africa for the last 30 years. One of the largest gatherings for one of his multi-day events attracted a single day crowd of over 1.6 million people! (You should have seen the video of the crowd as the camera panned across it… almost endless!) Since 2000, he has set a goal of seeing 100 million souls record a decision for Jesus Christ in this decade. To date, he’s seen over 42 million respond to that call.
This morning, I had the honour to be the TV director for three sessions featuring Tommy Barnett, followed by our own Pastor Leon Fontaine and finally Reinhard Bonnke. Reinhard blew the roof off the place! And that was just a small taste of what was to come because it got even better tonight.
So what else was/am I doing for the conference? Well, all of it is TV related. Thursday morning, I took care of on screen graphics. During each of the evening sessions, I’ve been handling the remote controlled focus for a steady cam operator who offered to run is rig for us. By handling focus, this frees him up to frame his shots so he doesn’t have to worry about focus as well. For those unfamiliar, a steadicam is a rig that is harnessed to the operator’s body. The camera sits on a suspension arm in a precisely balanced set up. As the operator walks, the rig eliminates the operator’s extra motion and holds the camera ’steady’. You watch TV or movie where the camera seems to circle around an actor several times but the motion is extremely smooth and fluid, chances are, that shot was done with a steady cam rig.
Well, that’s all I have to report on at the moment. It’s late and I’m quite tired, so off to bed with me.
