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I’m Dreaming of a Satellite Christmas
Where each campus production is nearly the same....
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To create additional visual impact for the 2010 Christmas Eve services at LCBC’s Manheim, Pa., campus, the church rented two Barco FLM-R22+ 22,000-lumen projectors to create projected virtual set designs. Images from the Barco projectors were edge-blended in Propresenter and displayed on the church’s existing 28-foot by 65-foot white cyclorama (cyc) curtain.
Lives Changed By Christ (LCBC): That goal is at the heart of LCBC Church in Manheim, Pa., formed 25 years ago by a group of Christian men and women who saw a multitude of churches in the area not reaching people for Christ. With “others” as their focus, they formed LCBC to reach both the un-churched and de-churched (those burned by/fed up with the church) in their community. And they have been quite successful in this goal—they now minister to over 10,000 people each week.
Like most churches, their facility space is finite. It can only grow so large and hold so many people. “When we were approaching the limits of our campus six years ago, we prayerfully contemplated what the next steps would be,” says Ryan Geesaman, video production director at LCBC. “We didn’t feel that God was done with us yet. There were more people needing to be introduced to Christ.”
With no room to add on, they explored other options for growth. The elder board researched how other churches were handling this, visiting churches such as Willow Creek in South Barrington, Ill., and North Point in Atlanta, both successful with the multisite campus concept. Through this process, they wanted to be certain that the multisite plan not only worked, but would work well for them.
LCBC staff has now launched two satellite campuses over the past four years, one in nearby Harrisburg, and another in Lancaster City. Through the process, they decided that their approach was to be one church in multiple locations. “To us,” Geesaman adds, “this means that as much as possible, the experience of attending church at any of our campuses would be identical.”
The worship portions of the service, while identical in song selection, are performed live at each campus. The message is videotaped Saturday evening in HD with a lock-down camera capturing a fixed full-body shot of the pastor. The video is then transferred to the satellite campuses for playback Sunday morning. Stage design is consistent between campuses, within the constraints that the physical spaces put on them.
Each campus, however, is a different size, with different resources. And at Christmas, when LCBC wants to take things up a notch, the constraint of implementing the same theme in different rooms presents numerous additional challenges.
Christmas Service Plans
“At Christmas, we have many more visitors, and we want to take that opportunity to show those in our community [who are] attending LCBC for the first time what our church is like every weekend,” says Geesaman. “So our Christmas service is basically the same as our weekend service—we just add some ‘wow’ factor into our Christmas Eve service.”
He continues, “We’ve done a variety of things in the past to spice things up. We’ve turned the stage into a Christmas tree farm; we’ve made a low-resolution video wall behind the stage, etc. For this year, we want to return to the idea of a video backdrop, but do it better.” And with their mission statement in mind, they needed to do it at three campuses, each with different stage configurations and limitations.
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Jim Kumorek is the owner of Spreading Flames Media, providing video/media production and writing services to the A/V/L, technology, architectural and hospitality industries. He has led audio, video and lighting teams in churches as both staff and a volunteer for over 10 years. He can be contacted at james@spreadingflamesmedia.com.
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