In Action: O Come, O Come Emmanuel
As part of celebrating the Advent, each service our church will light a candle and read a scripture passage. This last week on the hope of the coming Messiah. As part of the service, the worship band played a special number: O Come O Come Emmanuel. It was instrumental, but I prepared a presentation to accompany it. The presentation simply contains the words to the song which were presented in sync with music. Here is a video of the presentation:
This is a carol from the medieval times, so it seemed appropriate to use medieval-looking presentation screen -- parchment.
Initially I was going to build a slide show to for this presentation. After giving it some creative thought, I realized I could do all of this using just the song presentation capabilities of SSP and some clever application of display properties.
The background motion loop is Two Brick Candles from Shift Worship. For the parchment, I used #3413047 from iStockPhoto.com: . Since motion backgrounds are placed over image backgrounds, in order to get the parchment image to be superimposed over the motion background, I used the Image Overlay effect in SSP.
Unfortunately, the only version of the parchment image has a white background which results in this appearance:
This is easily solved using a paint program to convert the white areas to transparency and saving the image as a PNG:
One thing you might notice is that there are still little white artifacts around the edges of the parchment. It's not so noticeable here, but on the big screen, it is. I fixed this by applying the new Gaussian blur to the background giving it his appearance:
The lyrics were positioned within the parchment area by setting the layout properties.
Typically, we display songs verse-by-verse. In this case, the text size would have been too small:
So, first I set the the layout to display the song line-by-line, which helped a little:
Then I set an option that I never usually use and never recommend using: Word-wrap. In this case, however, it works. Using word-wrap, the parchment area is vertically filled nicely with text.
Having the line-by-line and word-wrap options available to me was very helpful.
Finally, you may have noticed the font used, and realized that it's not something you get with your typical Windows installation. I wanted a hand-written feel, and after some searching, I found a font called Dragon Fly that had the look I was hoping for. SSP had no problem using it.
BTW, the audio recording in this video is from one of the services last Sunday. Chuck Page (General Manager of GoFishMedia) is playing guitar. Deb Carruthers is on bass, Gary Baarson is on drums, and I'm on piano. It's the house mix so the sound isn't what it would be with a studio mix, but you get the general idea. I pulled a lead sheet from PraiseCharts.com which we worked from, then jazzed it up just slightly.
(BE171)