Learning from a concert Visualist

I found this interview with Deborah Johnson who at the time of the interview is performing visuals on tour with Sufjan Stevens.

With this blog I want to explore the areas of using visuals within a Christian meeting and as part of that we can learn a lot from what visualists do in clubs (VJs), concerts, art performances, even corporate or business events.  There will be practical aspects in common such as gathering and creating content, equipment, setup and operating, etc.  as well as more artistic aspects such as when to use one piece of content over any other piece at any time.

This interview with Deborah Johnson starts by covering specific elements of the show in question, how contentwas created and operated, etc. which is reasonably interesting but fairly technical.  Then there is this nice little conversation in the middle of the interview addressing what visuals add to a concert experience…

Deborah: … I’m very conscious of how distracting visuals can be. I try to wage that war as best I can. It feels like it’s a lot of responsibility.
Jaymis: It is, you’re the biggest person on stage.
Deborah: And I don’t like the spotlight, so there’s that weird thing. You really want to be behind the curtain yet you’re projecting huge images… I guess it averages out or something. But every once in a while I feel very self-conscious, that people are looking at the screen. Ideally you want, like, if someone’s only able to see the screen it’s a bummer, because they have those outfits on. When I make the visuals I try to think of them wearing those clothes, and how it’s all going to look together. If was just one element then it wouldn’t work as well…
Jaymis: But it’s in the same way though, I go to see a band that doesn’t have visuals and it looks really sad, you know?
Deborah: It does look weird.
Jaymis: We’ve had some shows where we supported an artist, we had visuals, and the headliner didn’t. It was a super-established band, the music was amazing, but I went out in the crowd and watched, and it just looked really sad. The lighting guy had his little 4 channel lighting desk, and he’s flashing the lights up and down and it looks like: “Awww, that’s so cute, it’s like they’re putting on a little concert!”. So can you imagine if there wasn’t visuals for your show, then the short people would have been staring at the back curtain for the whole night. So I never feel like I don’t belong. It’s always a struggle – especially with rock music – that you don’t want to take much attention, and it is a big responsibility, but I’ve never felt that I didn’t belong there. Because visually, despite having people with instruments and jumping around on stage or whatever. They’re still just little people moving around there.
Deborah: Right, it needs something.
Jaymis: Well it’s not that they even need it. It’s great that you had some pieces that were very minimal and there were some that didn’t have anything at all really, and that’s important too.
Deborah: I think so, you just need a break you know. With his set there’s just so many songs where visually and the audio is just so overwhelming. It’s like you just ate too much icecream, and then you need that like ~sigh~ a minute to rest your eyes, and rest your ears.  One thing he and I talked about last night is trying to arrange the set so there are more transitions. I feel like I do too many blackouts.

I find it interesting to think that the visual operator for a concert with such a focus on the visual element doesn’t want the visuals to distract from the main reason for being there (the artist and the music).  In the same way that when running visuals for worship we don’t want to distract from the worship itself.  Yet these other elements are worth also keeping in mind. Also, the phrase in the interview of being the ‘biggest person on stage’ is a good way of explaining the pressure not to make a mistake when the entire point of what you are doing is that people are looking at it.  I’m sure there are more lessons we can learn from this area of secular visual performance.

Full Interview here.  Also dig around on Deborah Johnson for videos showing her visuals during various live performances.

Worship, eyes closed or eyes open

[I have already posted this elsewhere, but I think it fits here better, so sorry for the cross posting]

I’ve been to two large Christian events recently. Worship Central’s visit to Glasgow and the CWW National Gathering.

Unfortunately in both cases I wasn’t able to get to the whole thing – life has just been too annoying lately with the amount of stuff that gets in the way – so I didn’t want to post too much about either, but one thing I’ve been going over since Worship Central is how much the total lack of visual stimulus distracted me from worship.  How can the lack of something distract me?

If there were awards for worship services (please don’t tell me there are), then the one at Worship Central would have won across the board as it ticks all the ‘right’ boxes.  Great worship leaders, good band, fantastic mix of songs well arranged and structured across the set and a ‘congregation’ of worship leaders and musicians who had waited for this sold out event, queued outside, anticipated and were ready to go.  So a win-win situation, what could possibly go wrong.  Me, apparently.

Yes, I did ‘enjoy’ the worship if you are aloud to say that sort of thing, and yes it did help me to focus on, think about and I suppose ‘meet with’ God, which I guess is the point.  But I just got so bored of staring at white text on a black background.  The church we met in had some banners up – these were all just text – and there was a nice big stained glass window (which had three characters in it that I have no idea who they were, it wasn’t obvious to me).  I got so bored I realised that I was looking around (while singing) looking for something that pointed to God and I couldn’t find it.

Jump forward two weeks – Church Without Walls National Gathering at Ingliston.  Again, I could only make part of the last day and I know there were lots of different styles of worship, singing, praying, service, etc. all going on but I only managed to get to two (more or less).   Sunday evening’s closing session for the national gathering was in the program as “Worship with Jonny Baker, Praise with Stuart Townend” which was interesting because we often use the words ‘Worship’ and ‘Praise’ to mean the same thing – singing.

Jonny Baker has posted here about what he did in that hour with an outline of the order things happened and links to resources.  Very useful if you were there but it doesn’t give the feel of what happened and neither can I. What I can say is that the visual stimulus which matched the music style and almost ancient chanting style of singing I found really helpful to quickly focus, become still and be with God.  Some of the visuals were specific to match what was being said, sung or read others less so but even on this scale (2-3000 people in a large venue with a stage fit for a rock concert) there was still an intimacy and sense of interaction.  This style of led worship with mixes of readings, liturgy, stories, etc. included asking for our physical participation in response to what was being said, it included a time to reflect what we wanted prayed for and to take away something to pray for a stranger – it was in other words, very well structured and rounded time of worship (not just singing songs)

Following this I stayed for the first song or two in the “Praise by Stuart Townend’ section, but I was too distracted, had a headache and wasn’t able to focus at all on it.  When I realised I was just singing the words for no good reason I left to go and think more about what had happened earlier.

So, are these the two extremes of contemporary worship – a guitar based band, leading song after song with the aim of getting us to think about God (presumably) and a bloke with a Mac using chilled music, singing, visuals and written words.  Perhaps it’s not just a visual thing as I had in mind when I started this post, not simply a case of eyes opened or eyes closed – perhaps it is that I’ve got a short attention span and prefer to have multiple things happening (visuals to look at, words to think about, music to listen to) and not just look at the band playing their instruments.