Heart of Darkness

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This post was inspired by Micah’s teaching at Awaken on March 25th, 2012. Here’s a link to the podcast: http://bit.ly/Hf3DdO

Available on Kindle for $0.00

In 1903, Joseph Conrad published a book about an English river-boat captain named Marlow on assignment in the African wilderness of Congo. There, Marlow encounters the horrific violence committed against the African slaves at the hands of European colonists. Conrad’s narrative forces his audience to grapple with the duality of human nature. As Marlow tells his story, the weather becomes increasingly ominous. At the conclusion of the book, we find Marlow in his boat floating on the river, deeper into the African wilderness which he describes as “immense darkness.”

Not exactly sunshine, rainbows and unicorns.

This motif of light and dark is something that the author of 1st John also wants us to consider. He writes, “anyone who hates a brother or sister is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness” (2:11).

What would it take for someone to hate their own sibling? Cain knows. He was intimately acquainted with the heart of darkness. He was the first person to not only hate, but actually murder his own brother.

Where does hate come from? Psychologically speaking, I’d suggest it comes from a combination of two things: fear and ego. Fear throws us into self-preservation mode. Fear of the unknown causes us to raise our defenses and ward off any imposing enemy. Ego trains us to inflate our self-image to the max. It objectifies and demoralizes any and every thing that might oppose us. It assumes everything is a matter of dominance and survival.

Think of people like: Cain, Haman, Herod, Nero, Hitler, Ho Chi Min, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mussolini, Hussein, Milošević, and Gaddafi. These were men of unfathomable hatred and violence. Their tremendous fear of weakness combined with their uber-egos made for the perfect storm of wrathful narcissism. (Unfortunately, many people wonder if God is really like this.)

Truth is…God is nothing like this. John reminds us that the thing that is deepest and nearest to God’s heart is love. But not in the typical sense. We have a westernized, sterilized, objectified understanding of love that isn’t helping us get closer to what John is saying. Another way to describe it is “compassionate otherness.” It is communal. It is shared. It is a collective effort.

To Micah’s point: God’s position towards us has always been one of love. And he put all his chips on the table when, in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, he repurposed the cycle of violence that was created by hearts of darkness. He made a complete mockery of hatred. He made the heart of darkness look feeble.

The question(s) are begging to be asked of us:

  • What is the role of the “compassionary?”
  • Where does reconciliation need to happen in our community?
  • What is our role in reconciliation? Is it passive? Is it active?
  • What steps do we need to take to get there?

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Green + Light + Vintage

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The past two months have had a few projects that I want to share with you.

GREEN
The first is Awaken’s most recent vision video. Since the beginning of January, we’ve been  using it to kick off each gathering. I had my daughter narrate the script, which in my humble opinion captures exactly what Micah and I discussed as we were brainstorming: simplicity and innocence.

As of late, my “go-to” font, is a crisp, monospaced, intelligent font called typograph pro. Of all the bold, all-caps fonts out there, typograph pro is the most subtle, even understated. I utilized some similar stock footage of fields with trees and adjusted the RGB curves of each clip to create the same sense of safety we all felt the first time we saw the Shire of Frodo Baggins.

(no video? click here: http://bit.ly/yMt64c)

LIGHT
Another recent project that took on a life of it’s own was a bumper for our current message series through the book of 1st John. The book’s predominant metaphor being “light” allowed me to focus on branding the entire series with a single lightbulb. It may seem obvious or even obtuse to some designer’s, but my general rule of thumb is to err on the side of simplicity to establish a strong, unified theme.


(don’t see a video? no sweat. click here: http://bit.ly/zWDafa)

VINTAGE
And last but not least is the series bumper for “The Power of a Word.” A four week series designed to reinvest meaning in words like love, hope, peace, and grace. I found myself running out of time to assemble all of the visual effects that I had envisioned happening in After Effects, so I did a pre-render, played it back in Quicktime and <gasp> videotaped it on my iPhone using a great little app called 8mm Vintage Camera. I won’t go into the details, but this app allowed me to create a lo-fi, aged film look quick. This is the essence of “quick and dirty” video editing.
Here’s the end result:

(http://bit.ly/y5jmuC)

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2 Heads Are Better Than 1

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I love to create. Especially collaboratively. Sometimes it gets tricky when you have too many cooks in the kitchen, but I find that good ideas get reinforced with the right people at the table. Likewise, bad ideas get the axe before you waste too much time and energy going in the wrong direction.

At Awaken, almost everything is accomplished in teams of some sort. When we plan a new series or produce a video, it’s even more important that everyone is “fishing in the same stream.” There have been times when I’ve pitched an idea that sounded solid to me, but when I brought it to the team, for whatever reason, it is became obvious that the idea was incompatible with the focus of the project. Such is the nature of an idea.

You have to wade through them to find the ones that just leap off the page. That said, I’m currently working with a friend of mine at Awaken to collaborate on the art for the next series.  To give credit where credit is due, he did all of the work to create the scene, 3D text with beautiful shading, etc.

Here’s what he came up with:

He gave me permission (very important when working as a team) to play around with it.   So I did. It may not be the finished product, but it gives us options.                               Here’s what I came up with:

While the contents stayed the same (with the exception of the wind turbines), the effects change the tone entirely.

I wanted to give it a slightly different story. Something vintage, magical and worn.

Here’s an overview of what I did:
  • added film scratches (using a paint tool at a low opacity)
  • added blotches (also paint tool at low opacity but bigger in size)
  • a very light but dirty vignette (just a layer of brown via paint bucket brought down to an opacity of 20% and soft eraser also at a low opacity across the crest of the hill)
  • and some “fast” clouds (inspired by intro and outro of Toy Story 3, thank you Ed Catmull also using the paint tool, a subtle white glow and the smudge tool)

I seriously love the 3D text that my friend created. I didn’t want to lose all the work that went into making that but I wanted to accentuate the series title more than anything.  Using the blur tool, I swept across the lower third of the graphic at decreasing intensities as I worked upward towards the crest of the hill. This effectively miniaturizes the piece and gives it a unique depth of field.

If you remember one thing from this post, remember this:

Subtle vignettes do a really good job in assisting your audience towards the focal point. Frame the focus with a vignette and you instantly make your concept more accessible to the viewer.

Final Thought:  Art is subjective. What I did, you may hate. You may love. Artistic collaboration takes three things:

  1. holding your art loosely
  2. humility
  3. willingness to go with the better idea, even if it’s not yours

Good luck and play nice.

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