As part of my ankle-deep immersion for his VBS I have been learning Chinese. I am using a number of apps, but mostly I am listening to podcasts from ChineseClass101.com. The podcasts are great for picking up the language and they have lots of notes about the culture, but they will email you incessantly, and you […]
MadMania
Faith, Books, and Stuff
Tag: Vacation Bible School
This is a pretty graphic-heavy post. When I first start working on a logo, I trial several fonts in Linotype FontExplorer, then I try them out in Illustrator to see which ones I like best, looking for things like readability, tone, and flavor. This lets me see which fonts I might want: […]
It can be tough picking a good title. You want something that communicates the overall theme of your production, and it needs to be able to reach kids who have only been reading for a year. Plus, while you, as the writer and director, have been steeping yourself in Chinese food, language, culture, and movies, […]
For the past two years Rahne has composed the theme music. For Law of the West, our wild west VBS, I was looking for music that would fit in with a John Ford / John Wayne / Roy Rogers good guy kind of western—not a spaghetti western. When she was working on it, we listened to a lot […]
Whenever I start work on a new VBS, I try to immerse myself in in the theme, especially if I feel I am not sufficiently familiar with it to do it justice. Last year when working on our Wild West themed VBS we watched a lot of westerns. Not just any westerns–since we were going […]
The story and script are constantly refined through every stage of the process. The greatest refinements are earliest in the process, and the finer ones later–providing no glaring story problems are discovered. When we first plotted this story we had three villains, each with specific attributes. I had an idea for one of the bad […]
It was Sherry’s idea to do our VBS themes on a five-year rotation, that way we would only have to write five skits, develop five sets, and 5 sets of materials. And since VBS is aimed at 1st through 6th grades, the most you (as a kid) would ever see the same skit would be twice—five […]
Every year since 2004* I either write or co-write the script for the skits that we use in our church’s vacation Bible school, as well as acting, directing / co-directing, designing the logo, and creating and/or supervising the production of the sets, props, and costumes. It can be massively rewarding, and a ton of fun. […]
“Write drunk, edit sober.” I had to learn this one from my daughter. Not that she drinks–that I know of–but the other night while I was up late working on the script for Vacation Bible School, I was typing so fast because my brain was firing ideas faster than I could record them, and I […]
A friend of mine coined this term to describe the fatigue experienced by those church members that worked Vacation Bible School and which contributed to their tardiness the following Sunday morning.