OK, so I started this blog under the title Christian VJ or Worship VJ, but I’mnot totally comfortable with these terms becuase the term VJ brings to mind club style visuals and in my experience this doesn’t work in worship services – unless your doing specifically DJ led worship or Dance/Club style worship which I’ve not seen much of recently (if it’s out there get in touch).
The other reaction the saying that you do Worship VJing is a blank look. So I figured that I’d take the term ‘Visualist’ which some club VJs and visual artists use and call myself (at least for this blog) a Christian Visualist.
The term is starting to grow on me and sounds less pretentious when I thought about it this way.
In a worship set a pianist or guitarist by playing their instrument adds to the overall sound mix, the Visualist ‘plays’ the visual mixer (hardware or software or mix of both) to produce a visual dimension to what is going on. Aslo, while this may be planned and scripted much like the musician following written music, there is more frequently a high degree of improvising going on during the worship set.
In some ways the term Worship Visualist might be better, but I had to choose one or the other for a blog title so that’s what I’ll stick to for now. I still like the terms “Christian VJ” and “Worship VJ” and would be interested in doing more of club style mixing but, to fit the praise/ worship atmosphere it is very infrequent that you can get away with fast paced cuts and mixes.
very cool.
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