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.

SMS text responses during event

[OK, not really very much to do with visuals, but the use of technology in a Christian Children's program]

One of the new things we tried out at CLANkidz this year was the use of live txting to get feedback and responses from children during the week.  This worked very well so here is what we did…

1 – get a proper system, don’t try doing this with a spare phone:

We approached Sanctus Media to provide this for us.  Which means that users can send texts to a 5 digit number with a keyword then their message.  These messages were collated on a web site for us so we log onto that, review the responses coming in and output these to either powerpoint or a text file.  Messages can be deleted or archived, additional keywords can be added, etc.  A very easy interface to access and use, by the end of the week we found ourselves using the text file output more than the powerpoint one, and then simply pasting it into a new song in our Easy Worship software.  This presented each text on its own screen at a nice large size making it easy for us at the back to skip around a little if there were lots of answers the same or to stop if it was going on too long – just a bit more flexable.

2 – build it into the program, not waiting for responses as they come in:

We started with an item in the program where you ask the audience a question, they instantly respond and the speaker waited for the responses to appear on the screen.  The system can can deal with this, you log into the web page (I used a Vodafone pay as you go modem to access because it was the only true pay-as-you-go I could find), look for the responses you are interested in and keep reloading the page, messages will be visible as they arrive.  When you think you have them all (or enough) export to powerpoint, open it and make it live on the screen(s).

So, while this CAN be done quickly there are a number of steps and it does take some time.  Also, while we are all very familiure with texting and expect messages to arrive instantly it doesn’t always work that way especially when everyone is in the same location so using the same mobile cell.  Lastly, especially relevant when used in children’s work, children will want to see their messages on screen and WILL complain if you don’t show it because it came in too late.

So, I think it would be much better to post the question, do something and come back to view the responses at least 5-10 minutes later.  This way everything is still live but there is more flexibility built in if anything slows the process down

3 – ask serious program related questions

OK, we had a week long program to play with so started the week asking things like “what’s the best thing to eat in St Andrews” (it came close between doughnuts and fish and chips), but the advantage of having more serious questions later in the week was that we could use those responces not only live, but also in the video and feedback to other organisers.  It also gave us a very good way of judging what level of understanding people had without having to go around with a roving mic to get responses – and even then there would be less people able to respond and only if they were confident with a mic being presented to them.

4 – non-program usage

Because we had this system available we came up with a couple of other uses for it.  The first was to ask parents for their comments and feedback to the team by adding an additional keyword.  The second was to help with debrief and feedback from team after the event by using another keyword that only team members text to.

5 – be careful about getting people to know the number

When Gordon was first introducing the concept of texting the 5digit number at the start of the week he came up with a silly little tune for a jingle.  This got really annoying by only half way through the week but eventually became a joke – put a little more thought than we did into this.  It worked very well for remembering the number by setting it to a tune but have a good tune!

Overall

A very useful system to add to any program for adults or children.  It was a good way of communicating for some people and was much better than having say a roaming mic.  It meant more people could be included, added a bit of novelty and technology to the event and was very kid friendly.

Video for Magnification (imag or image mag)

Big Christian events and churches often have a live camera feed to the screen to help people see the speaker.  The good reasons to do this is if the size or layout of the venue mean that many people can’t see and to get close to the facial expressions the speaker may be using.  In this first picture you can see the expression on Gordon’s face on the screen but can hardly make him out on the extreeme right of the image…

However, what I don’t understand is why live video is used when it doesn’t add anything.  It should never be used to give a wide shot of a stage which in effect adds nothing at all.  Look at this…

See the problem?

For both of these photos I was in front of the front row of this venue i.e. between the front row and the stage – but way off to one side (as mentioned in previous posts I was involved in the children’s programme at this event and this is the day that the children come in for the parents to hear what we have been doing all week).

So here is why I think this is a waste of time…

This photo shows that Jenny (who is leading the worship) is the same size (actually a little smaller) on the screen as she appears in perspective looking at the stage.  So what is this image on large screens either side of stage adding?

I’m not saying that live cameras shouldn’t be used.  They are very good for magnification of the speaker – as mentioned before.  But [I think] there should never be a medium or wide shot which visually doesn’t add anything.

The other problem is that because events have live cameras they end up using them during worship which totally baffles me.  Why do you need a close up of the worship leader singing, or a guitarist, drummer, keyboard player, etc.?  I don’t get it. Obviously, given this blog, I am very much in favour of visuals during worship but generally speaking I wouldn’t include live camera in that – there have been a few occasions I have used live camera but very very occasionally and thinking back on those events I don’t actually think they worked that well.

OK, so ‘rant’ over – if you are involved in this sort of event and find yourself projecting live video of the band please question why and if something else might be more suitable.

Visuals in Children’s work

Just got back from tech’ing for the children’s ministry at CLAN this year.  No time yet to write anything up, but here’s some relevant pics of setup at least…

start of the week didn’t look good – no black out (which we had for the past three years but seems to have been left out this year), smaller fast folds and weeker projectors didn’t fill us with confidence.  It meant we cut some major aspects of our plans straight away and we are all sure we could have had a better program with the ability to use full visuals and lighting, but no point on dwelling on it.

This was taken when the parents come in to see what the program was like.  You can see that some patchy blackout has been added to try to help.  Also, here you can see six TVs around the stage, this is predominantly for the younger (smaller) children along the front for whom the side screens would be difficult to see.  Due to the light levels we used the same image on all screens to avoid confusion (the plan was to throw different images on different screens)

Here is a photo taken during worship, you can see I tried using some lighting to aid excitement and atmosphere but there was no way to overlay words on video as it wasn’t easy to see the words in these conditions.

The last problem we faced was that there just wasn’t enough macs to go around – only three macs between two just isn’t enough :-/

Reviewing the past

I’m very busy getting ready for a children’s event next week.  It is the children’s work at a large Christian Conference in Scotland which we’ve been involved with for the past four years.  The first year Jenny took a band into the children’s work and as I usually work with her I went along to provide some visuals.  The following year Jenny was in the team who took on the children’s work for all primary children and again I got involved.

At the time we had to go to a considerable effort to convince the organizers that the children’s work (the way we were doing it) needed two additional tech’s and a pile of video gear – even though we were really doing it on the cheap as much as possible.  Anyway, in a couple of days we pack the van again and head off to do it again.  I thought I would have a look back at the notes I made back in 2006 after the first time we aimed to fully integrate a visual ministry with the children’s work.  The following is what I wrote then, a lot of it we have learned to do better and I will try to write up some of what we do next week and hope to see what if anything is different.

---

this is a sort of summary of some of the uses of video that we made at CLAN Kidz 2006

Vox Pops
Our theme was HEART or the Father Heart of God, or how God loves us as Father, or something along those lines.  We planned to have a VoxPop video put together for each morning session asking people what they thought the word for that day meant.  To get something ready we filmed the first one using the team at one of the training sessions.  The rest were done at CLAN using a mobile camera with interviewer and to get people’s attention and make sure people knew that the Kidz team were on site, we mounted a camera to a large fluffy heart (can’t believe that I have no pics of this).

So, 6 voxpops to lead off discussion of ‘Holy’, ‘Eternal’, ‘Abba (daddy) ’, ‘Ruler’, ‘Truth’ and a final sumary one with clips from the others… of course as we were at a Christian conference people kept giving us the ‘right answer’ so ‘Abba’ does actually mean father or daddy to Christians and not the 70s super group!

These seemed to work, but I don’t know how or if you could measure the effectiveness of this sort of element in a program.

Heart Surgery
For the evening sessions where we were looking at ‘Humble’, ‘Enjoy’, ‘Adore’, ‘Respect’, ‘Trust’ we had already filmed a series of sketches with Alistair, Bruce and Andrea playing the parts in a spoof ‘heart surgery’ soap.  This involved a few jokes before the Doctor found and removed from the heart things like ‘Pride’ (opposed to Humble), ‘Distrust’ (opposed to Trust), etc.

Again there was no way of knowing how this would go down with this age group (although we kept laughing at it).  On the first couple of days, they just sat and watched, then turned to hear what would be said next…  by the third or fourth day as the episode started they were singing along with the theme tune, cheering for “Dr Vain” and for some reason booing “Nurse Heart” – who was the only actor from the sketch who was actually there.

Other visual ideas that worked well were

• Live Camera – sparing use of live camera for games happening up front (how long can you hold a fruit pastel in your mouth without chewing was good because while other things went on I had close ups of the children’s mouths and folk shouted if they were chewing or not).

• Branding, I had made a series of video titles of the words ‘CLAN kidz’ with different animated fonts so that we could brand and give ownership to the venue.

• Voxpops needs another mention – the first one was entirely team members
  a) this meant I could film it at one of your preparation meetings,
  b) it helped introduce team members to the children on day one, and
  c) it helped me meet team members and them get used to the idea that I would be very likely to shove a camera in their face (and also for me to find out who really didn’t like that and try to avoid doing it to them).Also, while at CLAN we used a large pink fluff heart shape strapped onto a mono-pod with the camera sticking through it to run around and get people’s attention – this combined with our team T-shirts let the general CLAN delegate who might not think anything about children’s work going on see that something was happening and hopefully pray for the children!  It also saved any ‘what is this going to be used for’ moments.

• Team Wall – I’m not sure about this.  I came up with the idea (more difficult to explain than to see) of having all the team members images in a 5 by 4 table on screen, but instead of still images each would be a video, some being more animated than others – giving a wall of moving and changing images.  It was a little bit of a fiddle to make, but not as hard as I thought and a learning process, but I’m not sure what it added to the venue/events.

• Story time – for each children’s story we took photos of the picture books, powerpointed them and followed along in the story. Simple but essential to hold attention.

• Drew’s daddy video – a ‘one off’ video that I will certainly use again and again.  Drew was one of the leaders and was there with his three children, so we spent 15 minutes filming them running to him jumping on him or being swung around as well as hugs, and sitting to read with daddy.  You can’t go wrong with footage like this – lots of slow motion and gradual fades and make it fit to a suitable backing track. Guaranteed tear jerker.

• Testimony – while doing our best to avoid filming children because of all the legal / permission problems.  I suddenly realized that during our team meetings at the end of the day I should film people’s stories from the day of what God was doing in and through the children.  It remains to be seen what can be done with this footage and it might be good to find a way of feeding it back to the adults session during the week if we do this in future years.

• Nothing – worth mentioning that when you want the children to listen or focus on one thing, showing nothing i.e. blanking all the screens, helps a lot.  It is difficult for us at the back to keep that in mind when most of the time our focus is on getting things happening on the screens.

Basically, while I know that visuals (video and stills) add a lot to worship and teaching for adults, this is even more the case for children who are more used to lots of things happening around them.  Who respond to visual stimuli that backs up spoken word or experience.

cathedral art projection

I came across this on Create Digital Motion it is a video of ANTIVJ who do artistic projection mapping, light sculpture, outdoor projection, stuff.  This basically means “painting” architecture and objects with projected images. It isn’t something I’ve had time to look at but I’m intrigued and would like to investigate this more – not that I think I’ll be able to do this sort of thing:

This video is a live performance at Cathedral of Breda, NL with original music by Thomas Vaquié, played on organ by Gerard Maters with light design by Giacinto Caponio, Grote Kerk is a sublime modern, digital spectacle, a light and sound show all performed live using software from arKaos.

The Spiritual Stuff

I had always planned to use this blog for a mix of “How to..” guides and some of the spiritual Christian aspects of using visual media in a worship context.  Of course the practical stuff is not only easier to write about than the spiritual side, but this week I have a good example which should illustrate how I find video mixing a spiritual experience.

So this month’s Deeper service at St Silas had a set up of three projectors all taking the same signal from a Mac Book Pro running ArKaos Grand VJ software – with the middle screen also having song words keyed over when needed.

We kept the set up fairly simple in that it was a straight forward 800×600 screen size.  Two of the eight available layers had a chroma key type mix, the others were just opacity mixes.

The first part of the service was more or less a scripted running order with mostly specific videos to appear on queue for the talk etc. but once it gets to the sung worship time the song words are provided by another operator and I have no script to follow for what visuals appear on screen, when to change them, how to pace it, etc.

I had a look through the song list a few times, praying and thinking about insperation but I don’t generally go into any great detail with any song – I don’t look through the words too much in advance just the general feel for direction.  During the set I will often have a look at what is coming up next and glance at the words at that point.  It’s also worth saying that I’m not particularly good with worship music, I can never remember how something goes until I’m singing it -but that’s just me.  Song list:

• Blessed be the name
• It’s our confession
• You chose the cross
• Holy God
• God in my living
• O taste and see
• Who is like you
• Let the weak say

So the way the set developed seemed to be working well.  I started off with mainly abstract & conputer generated graphics which fitted the tempo but not generally trying to say anything.  Then through “It’s our confession” I added in some stills of hands tied together being opened up, and gradually added more footage of a celtic cross, then flames, etc.  frequently coming back to the CG abstract stuff to weave that through as  a sort of theme.

For some reason (let’s call it God) during the second last song I noticed that I hadn’t used any water type images so I had a quick look at the name of the next song: “Let the week say..” (aka What the Lord has done in me” ) – it didn’t particularly bring anything to mind so I loaded up a set of watery videos ready for the last song.  During the song I moved from water splashing to sparkly light reflections on water and so on.  Then during the song it turned out these were the words (my emphasis)…

To the river I will wade
There my sins are washed away
From the heavens’ mercy streams
Of the Savior’s love for me

I will rise from waters deep
Into the saving arms of God
I will sing salvation songs
Jesus Christ has set me free

So, what I’m trying to say is – pray before hand, be prepared and pray during.  I now have a large and constantly growing ‘pallet’ of video footage to draw on and try to listen for insperation.  Sometimes I come away thinking or feeling as if I’ve done it all with my own effort, and sometimes I have no idea why I decided to use a certain type of image (like the water ones) and they fit exactly with what God is doing.

This leaves us wuth a fine line between preparing well (i.e. having the footage available and knowing it well) and not over preparing (i.e. scripting what image to use with each song) – so that God has space to do his own stuff through what you are doing.

ArKaos Grand VJ Performance troubleshooting tip

[update:30June2009 - see also this info added to the ArKaos blog]

[I'm still learning lots about ArKaos GrandVJ software, so posting notes, tips, etc. for my own memory and that may be of use to others, however I'm no expert and am gathering this here from manuals, forums and hands on experience and expressing it in my own words - if I get anything wrong and you know better please let me know and I'll update as appropriate.]

Keeping an eye on performance…

There are two figures in the bottom Status Bar of Grand VJ ‘Graph‘ and ‘Total‘ AS FAR AS I CAN TELL these work something like this:

Graph is the fps being sent by the GrandVJ engine to the Graphics card / graphics processor
Total is the fps being sent out by the Graphics card / graphics processor

The figures change in real time according to what you are doing in the layers, how many are active, what effects are in place, etc.  It is important to learn what these two numbers are when everything is OK, so that you know what ‘normal’ looks like.  Then when you see a problem on screen with a choppy or stuttering image you can use these figures to tell you if the problem is with the mac or somewhere down the line as follows:

• If TOTAL is in the ‘normal’ range then the problem isn’t with the MAC
• If TOTAL is low but GRAPH is ‘normal’, the most likely problem is computing the image to be output (1)
• If TOTAL is low and GRAPH is low, the most likely problem is pulling video from the HDD and decompressing it (2)

(1) if the problems with the graphics card/processor computing the image can be resolved by reducing the complexity of the output, i.e. the number of visible layers, resolution of footage, effects being applied, etc.

(2) if the problem is pulling video from HDD and decompressing, there isn’t much you can do ‘on-the-fly’ but when you have time try the same setup with the same footage pulled from another location to confirm the problem is HDD access or decompressing.  If it is HDD find a better solution, if the problem is decompressing converting the footage to a better format/codex should help.