Let’s face it lighting without haze is the equivalent of looking at your Christmas tree lights from across the living room… they can be pretty, but nothing to write home about. However, when we add haze to a room and shoot some lighting beams through it, we can make an entirely different, immersive, amazing, mind-blowing, awesome, 3-dimensional experience. Our auditorium seats around 700. We use some decent lighting gear along with IMAG. However, our old, water-based hazer produced something more…
Things I Like: IPEVO document camera Your pastor comes to you and says, “for this Sunday it would be really helpful if I had the ability to draw something out during the sermon and everyone could see what I was drawing.” Short of having a NFL style telestrator or figuring out a way to interface a tablet and stylus into your production switcher; how would you accomplish his request, both easily and inexpensively? You could just offer the pastor a…
Putting together a team of great volunteer tech people can be tough. But let me challenge your thinking on this topic with this statement: we, in church tech, tend to make it tougher on ourselves. Don’t believe me? Well, let’s put 60 seconds on the clock and take a look at the topic of… Bringing in (intimidated) volunteers If you are doing tech well – you will likely have people in the room thinking “wow, this is really cool. They…
“Take 1” … minute to improve your team One of the challenges in volunteer-driven church tech is keeping people on the same page. In many cases we find totally different teams serving from week-to-week. If unmanaged, these teams can drift apart in terms of their styles. As I visit churches, I hear things like “I didn’t even have to look in the booth to know who was running sound/video/lights/etc. today”. So, let’s take on the topic of establishing your “style”…
“Take 1” … minute to improve your team I’m so excited to be kicking off a new series of Controlbooth.tv mini-blogs related to improving your volunteer team and culture! At my church, The Ridge located in Columbus IN I am honored to lead a video tech team of about 30 people (in a church of 1,400). Our hope is to not only inform what has worked for us, but also to start some conversations. More importantly, our hope is for…
Many churches doing Imag on a budget turn to the Blackmagic Design’s ATEM as their switcher of choice. It’s an affordable option with a great deal of features. The Journey We purchased ours almost 4 years ago for use in an all-volunteer, 5-camera Imag setting. We launched Imag after being in our building for a few years. At that time we had 3 cameras feeding the ATEM and we controlled it with an iPad app (Strata Pro). After some reliability…
Can you imagine having to listen to the same person for 5 hours? Even if it was a great speaker – that’s a long time. Now let’s make things worse by starting that listening session early on a Sunday morning. Ugh! But, that’s exactly what some of our tech people (for example, camera operators) go through each week. They sit quietly in the isolated world of their dual-muff headsets and listen…and listen… and listen. With rehearsals and pre-service work, this…
I really hate confrontation. In fact, I don’t even like tension in a conversation. But sometimes in leadership we need to have some hard conversations with our people about their performance. These are not fun. In fact… If these conversations are fun, you should probably not be a leader. So how do you encourage a poor performer? How do you graciously let someone go? Let’s put one minute on the clock and start the (difficult) conversation. Apart from prayer, before…