VBS at EagleNaz: The Giving Slides
At the recent VBS program at our church, we had a project where the children brought offerings that would be used to help people in need in our area. To add some interest to it, the children were divided into two teams with a running competition to see who would donate the most. I put together a slide showing the progress of the two teams. Here's a screen shot of one of the slides (Keep in mind, this is for VBS):
Most of the graphics on slide were provided to us as part of the VBS program package (Group's Paul and the Underground Church) including the background, emblem, coins, and seal.
The coin and seal images were provided as JPEG images with white backgrounds. It would have been more helpful if these images had been provided as PNG files with a transparent background. SongShow Plus does let you select a color on an image to be the transparent color, but unfortunately, this feature is very ridged - if the background color deviates just a little, it won't be transparent. As it is, the transparent color selection worked pretty well - just a little white border around the coins - but I wanted something cleaner. I used Paint.net to convert the background to a transparent color and saved the image as PNG. Paint.net has tolerance setting that lets you also pick up colors that are similar to the key color you select. We need to implement a similar feature in the future.
I also applied transparency to the emblem, coin, and seal images -- an attempt to make them look more part of the document, and not just an out-of-place graphic overlay.
The column images are from iStock Photo (4428790). I used the Huescale effect to give the columns some color (the originals were white). They were actually provided an EPS file, so for my purposes, I loaded them into Adobe Illustrator, then saved them to PNG files. This gave them the transparent background that I needed. I, of course, had to manually calculate and manipulate the size of the columns to give them their bar-chart like look.
The font was one that just happened to be on our church system for some reason that I'm unaware of. It's called Isabelle.
Anyway, the grand total came up to $984.65.
Afterward, someone ponied up an additional $16 to put it over the $1,000 mark.
Incidently, the loosing team had to step into a small swimming pool of applesauce and gummy fish, then reach in, grab a fish, and eat it.
(BE213)