Video for Worship: Finding Your Video Philosophy and Style

Investing in the equipment to live stream your house of worship's events is the easy part - making the live stream footage engaging is another. Nailing your production philosophy and style takes planning and finesse. This article zeros in on 3 different audience types as a means to develop a consistent style. It's a great way to narrow choices and refine video production so that style and philosophy align. Take a look. From ChurchProduction.com

A directing mistake sparked Grace Church to develop a video philosophy. The result is a common language to communicate what success looks like to the staff and volunteer video team.

I made a mistake during a rehearsal one weekend --- a mistake that changed the course of how we use live video at Grace Church. In the moment, I was sure I was going to have to explain the mistake to my superiors. To my surprise my superiors saw the mistake and loved it, asking me if we could do it on an ongoing basis. Needless to say I was a bit shocked. The mistake ultimately turned into a launching point, the beginning of a process to establish a common language to be able to communicate clearly what success means to our staff and volunteer video team. The Grace Church “Way of Production” for video was born.

In late summer of 2008 we opened a new auditorium. The new space is unique in that it has 270 degrees of seating and about 400-600 seats sit behind the front center speaking position. Our congregation and team was familiar with IMAG as we used it in our old space for the message and other special elements. The big difference was we would be using it for the whole service, something we had never done before.

After nine months in the new space I was frustrated and could not identify why. As a video team we were producing a solid product but it was inconsistent and was missing something from week to week. After approaching my worship arts pastor, we made our first step towards clarity by selecting 8-12 person focus group. We intentionally invited people with different video backgrounds and ended up with a nice cross section. We had professional television news anchors and staff, video production artists and people with no background in video at all. We asked the group to commit to a four-week period and asked them fill out a questionnaire during the service they attended as well as participate in a group review lunch on the fourth weekend....read more