What is Visual Worship?

I’ve finally put together some videos trying to demonstrate and explain what I do when mixing visuals.  I’ve previously defined what I mean by the term ‘Christian Visualist‘ which is wider than simply the video or other visuals behind or beside song words during sung worship but includes other elements of the physical space, the meeting is taking place in.  However, it does tend to be during the sung worship that there is a freedom to VJ or mix visuals ‘off the cuff’ or as inspired by the Holy Spirit…  that’s what I’m trying to show here:

Overhead Camera

Here’s an unusual set up from our morning service yesterday.

What you are looking at is a style of service we are working on a lot at the moment called ‘together’ which is designed no just to be ‘all-age’ to include children, but to get people working and interacting together during a service.  Anyway, the concept is good and seems to be working but this little video trick seemed worth blogging.

Above is our ’shower curtain’ wide-screen (which is performing remarkably well on this bright autumn morning) with two projectors rear projecting two different feeds.  The signal on the left is from our Easy Worship PC while the signal on the right is an overhead ‘bullet cam’ which is hanging in the middle of the photo.

What happened was Jenny, who can be seen leading this bit, gathered the children around the square drawn with masking tape on the floor.  Meanwhile everyone had been asked to text in the answer to “what do non-Christians believe will get them to heaven?”

Then as each answer sent in appeared on the left hand screen (not shown here by the way) a line of masking tape was added to the picture on the floor to indicate if that thing would get the person from left-to-right or from us-to-god (I’m sure you know where this is heading.  Then eventually a red cross was added using electrical tape (if we did this again I don’t think we would use red tape on a red carpet but I think this was because we ran out of masking tape).

As you can see the kids have stayed gathered at the front although one was more concerned that the red tape hadn’t actually made it all the way to heaven… they were then given cards with the full illustration on it and sent back to their groups and everyone was asked to pray and draw where they were or where they wanted to be in this illustration of being away from God or through the cross being with God.

We have used live cameras before in these services so that if close up children’s work is going on everyone else can see it.  But in this case we wanted to look directly down and needed a separate feed of txt responses and teaching points while the live camera was also on – so the dual projectors were set up.

Other lessons learned – we should have used the normal lens on the bullet camera but thought that the wide angle would show more floor space.  A narrower lens would have meant we could have pulled the camera higher so it was less obtrusive.  As always, these sorts of set-ups never go to plan and take at least twice the amount of time you thought they would.

Mixing during a sermon

After a few months off over summer during which CLANkidz took up a lot of my time (planning, getting there and doing it, running into problems like trying to do visuals in a non-blacked out venue, and all the other bits of tech which isn’t visual that drags me away from the main passion), it was good to get back to the regular Deeper services at church that generates most of the creative drive. When I say it was good to get back it was actually such a trauma that it has taken me two weeks to write much about it.

But it is worth noting this new thing…  mixing visuals, off the cuff, during the sermon.

This was kind of sprung on me in that as we started the service (the set up had been a nightmare of software failures and resets) Jenny – one of the two-up speakers said something like “our powerpoint is only scripture quotes on black background, so if you want to mix behind it feel free..”  I then didn’t get much time to think about it during the first part of the service and suddenly it was the talk.

A good rule of thumb for mixing visuals is “when in doubt do nothing” so I didn’t go panic but left everything as simple white text on black background that was being fed to me form the words operator.  During the talk it became apparent what Jenny had meant because she was using these sorts of verses:

• “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean”
• “to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water”
• “I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you are heart of flesh”

so visual queues came to mind of water, rain, rivers, hands being cleansed, waterfalls, stone, rock, brick, soft fabrics, clouds, trees…

But that was when I ran into the next problem – zero preparation.  While I knew in by video folders I had these sorts of images by the time the quote came on screen and I found it there was too much of a lag.  So I had to go check what was coming up with the words operator and get ready for towards the end of the sermon and those verses weren’t as clear cut to me as the earlier ones. So option one of knowing what was going to go on screen didn’t help, back to basics – praying and listening to the talk and as ever it started to fall into place.

Jenny and Gordon were speaking about some tough subjects related to God renovating our hearts, about surrendering all.  Two images came to mind straight away – one was of a person on a swing in an empty swing park, just sitting thinking; the other is a gradual fade between three pictures of a person’s hands bound by a rope and then being released.  The images were both black and white so I fired them up to fill up the screen.

These were working well and I was able to overlay a sparkling heart shape which worked with what was being said, but then I felt that as these had been up too long it was time to move on and for some reason I started using a loop of a potter molding clay into a jar.  I wasn’t sure why at the time and as Gordon closed the talk with a prayer, he glanced at the screen and worked that image into the prayer.

Later a friend came to tell me that during the last part of the talk she had her eyes closed and got the idea about how when throwing a pot (which she has some experience in) you have to have the clay centered on the wheel – she felt God might be telling her that the church needs to be centered.  Then she opened her eyes and there was an image of a potter making a jug … we take that as confirmation.

So my point.  Even often it is good to follow any thoughts or prompts that come to mind when VJing a service but for a sermon I think there needs to be some preparation.  Also, in our weakness and uncertainty God can still use what we are doing.