Collide Magazine

Church Spotlight: Fresh Life Church

Scott McClellan - Originally posted Thursday, June 10, 2010 -

We’ll be honest with you: We’d never heard of Kalispell, Montana, before we were introduced to Fresh Life Church. Heck, on a map, Kalispell looks like it’s closer to the US-Canada border than it is to the nearest state (Idaho). With that in mind, we were impressed by Fresh Life Church’s commitment to creative excellence. The church creates all its media in-house, operates multiple sites using an HD video feed, streams its services, maintains a radio station (FM and streaming via www.freshliferadio.com), and invites its membership to explore the creative disciplines of music, film, photography, design and technical arts through semester-long courses. The pastor, Levi Lusko, even has text messages from congregants sent to an LCD screen on his pulpit, so he can address audience questions. Not bad, eh? We wanted to find out more, so we asked Kevin Guido from the Fresh Life team a few questions. 

Kevin Guido, Creative Arts Pastor and Worship Leader

COLLIDE: What does your average day consist of?

Guido: One of the things that I love about the creative world is that there are no average days. Every project is completely different, and everyday has different demands based on what is coming down the pipe. This is great because I’m super ADD, and I get bored fast. At any moment we could be loading equipment and props into a truck to shoot a video in the mountains, mixing down a song from a live show at Skull Church for YouTube, designing promo materials for the next series, sitting in a meeting, watching tutorials online, fixing the radio stream, writing songs, or drinking coffee and laughing. Of course, there are many responsibilities that I consistently need to take care of on a weekly basis like editing the video podcast, updating the website and putting the worship sets together for all of our services.

COLLIDE: Describe the creative process at Fresh Life Church.

Guido: I am a huge believer in the fact that great ideas come from a collaboration of different minds. If ideas only came from me, then most of our material would simply be a duplication of what’s already cool or forefront in the design world. Inviting others to be a part of the process brings different interpretations of life, different insights, and different ways of thinking to the table. Whenever we have a new series approaching or we have a crazy new idea for the church, we schedule a huge meeting with creatives, interns, assistants, pastors, and administrators. We all cram into a room equipped with a healthy supply of pizza, Red Bull, and Rockstars (maybe some carrots and ranch if the admins are lucky). We have a giant Post-It note easel that becomes the subject of reckless idea firing. One person takes the helm to write down ideas and guide the process along in order to keep us all moving in a somewhat consistent direction. No idea is too big or too ridiculous. Everything is written down and when a page is full, it is torn off and hung on the wall. By the end of the meeting we have a room full of empty energy drink cans and walls covered in great ideas. From that point, our creative department is usually equipped with a massive amount of inspiration to get our work done.

COLLIDE: Do you ever feel stuck on a design or video project? How do you get past that feeling?

Guido: Everybody gets stuck. It’s one of the biggest challenges of being creative for a living. Sometimes I sit there in front of a white screen wishing I could “see” the final project in my mind so that I can just make it happen. A lot of times, I find I need to simply start playing with whatever vague ideas or concepts that I do have. This venturing out, combined with a great album rocking loud in my iTunes is exactly what I need to ignite that creative spark which ultimately culminates in the final product. If I have time on my side, then the best thing for me to do is wait. Inspiration largely comes from the world around me, which I interact with on a daily basis. I watch people. I read. I drive. I listen to music. I eat out. I huck my bike off a cliff. I live life all while keeping my creative roadblock in the back of my mind. At some point, something that I interact with will light the fuse to a firework in my brain that will be the perfect solution to my project’s direction.

COLLIDE: What is your ideal project?

Guido: I thrive on being ridiculously intentional with creative direction. My ideal project would be something that incorporates as many people in as many creative capacities as possible all unified around a singular idea. I would want to gather musicians, videographers, designers, writers, programmers, engineers, fabricators, architects, and off-the-wall thinkers together in a room to figure out how we could intricately weave all of our potentials together in a way that blows that idea out of the water. Then sprinkle on some mystery and a little suspense, and I think we’ve got my ideal project.

COLLIDE: What hardware, software, and websites are essential for you as a Creative Arts Pastor?

Guido: Doing my job without a Mac would be like skydiving without a parachute. I have a MacPro that is lightning fast, which makes rendering quick and a lot less painful. I think that having a color accurate display is a necessity in the design world and saves me from a lot of bad prints and awful video. Photoshop is definitely the most used program on my computer because of how intensely diverse the program can be. I use Final Cut Pro for editing video and Logic for audio production. All 3D work is done in Cinema4D and post-production video work is done in After Effects from Adobe. After Effects is a really fun program. It is like Photoshop for video. Coda is cheap and amazing for doing website work. One of my favorite programs in the world is a little program called Pipette that allows you to sample any pixel on your screen and then provides you with the Hex Color Code for
that pixel.

For somebody like me who has no formal education or training, www.tutsplus.com is an incredible free resource. They have tutorials for everything the creative realm has to offer. Also, www.videocopilot.net is amazing for people who want to jump into the rabbit hole of video effects and processing. They offer a two-hour basic training for After Effects that is an awesome place to start. If you have some budget available for learning, www.lynda.com is the place to go. You can be trained by the best people in the world, on your timetable, and for as long as you are willing to hang with them.

COLLIDE: Have you ever created a piece that failed spectacularly?

Guido: I think we have enough checks and balances in our process that we can, for the most part, prevent spectacular fails. It seems like most of our fails come in bite size packages. I often misspell words, type the wrong dates, and even leave out valuable information. Once we printed 6,000 full-color bulletins through an online service, and I accidentally left out our other campus and service time. We had to run every bulletin through a printer and use black ink to put that information back onto the print.

COLLIDE: Tell us about Skull Church. How is it different from what you guys do on weekends at Fresh Life Church?

Guido: Skull Church is an explicitly evangelistic service. It’s a platform to amplify the message of what happened at Calvary (the place called The Skull) to a lost generation using text-message interactions, surprise guest artists, hard-hitting gospel messages, and art that makes some Christians uncomfortable. To quote Craig Groeschel, “We are willing to do things that no one is doing to reach people that no one is reaching.” Skull Church is what we call a Bible Study on Red Bull. It is a verse-by-verse study on Wednesday nights and is saturated in creative media. We bring in killer artists like Kristian Stanfill, The Myriad, and Family Force 5, but we never announce when a band is coming. People attending don’t find out there is a guest band until the band is announced by the night’s emcee at the start of the service. The goal is not have the coolest or largest Bible study in town so that we pack a theater full of Christians but to have a place where those who don’t know God can get to know Him.

To find out more about Fresh Life Church, visit www.freshlifechurch.org.