Image courtesy of Rock Harbor Church, Meridian, ID.
Directing IMAG is one of the single most challenging things I have ever learned to do. It's very much like a game of chess in that you have be focused on the moment but living a little bit in the future. It requires you know what will be happening 20 seconds from now and be planning for that, but be executing right now. If you have never directed before it's really difficult to appreciate what it takes to do it. Many times in my career as a video director I have had people say to me, “What you do doesn't look that tough, you're just calling out numbers.” If only it were that easy.
Never let your IMAG become a distraction, otherwise your have defeated the purpose completely.
In this article I want to give you some ideas about how to improve yourself as a director or to improve the team mates you may have serving as directors. There are some challenges when it comes to deciding how you want your IMAG to look. Challenges may include having enough volunteers that can be trained to do what you want, as well has having a budget that allows to buy the gear that will enable your team to succeed. I say that because I know too often that how churches do IMAG is not the result of the video director saying “I want it to look like this” near as much as it is the video director saying “I want it to look like this, but we cannot do that, so we are going to make sacrifices and do it like this.” This is really common in the church world, so be aware when you are trying to look for ways to improve your directing skills, your situation may be unique enough to warrant a technique or style that really only makes sense in your situation. You should never set out to make your IMAG look like church X, especially when you don't know what church X's circumstances are. Instead you should look at what church X does and try and figure out why they do it that way. The “why” is far more useful knowledge.
For the online audience, it's important to include camera shots that establish the room and the people in it. However if your audience issitting in the main room you never need those shots.
1) Know the music
If you are doing IMAG for worship, your director must know the music. That means you should be listening to it all week prior so you know where the breaks are and know where the solos are. It simply does not make sense to have camera shots coming in fast and furious for a song that is slow and contemplative because your IMAG will become a distraction. While knowing the music is functionally important, it's also important that you know what emotion your worship team is trying to evoke, so you can work in conjunction to achieve that emotion. This is important because emotion is what moves people along in a service. If you can connect with people on an emotional level, then you can succeed in a really big way. If you don't make that connection, then you limit what you could be doing.
2) Stock your arsenal
It's important for a director to know the tools at his disposal. For example, if your worship team is doing a slow introspective song, that should mean the camera shots are going to longer, slower and less dynamic movement. The transitions will also be longer and less frequent. The camera operators will also start employing focus rolls and rack focuses that match the somber emotion. We refer to this style as “classy” and it is one of tools in our arsenal. It is not, however, the only tool in our arsenal. The most important thing about having the tools is knowing when, and sometimes more importantly, when not to use them. So develop tools, styles, and techniques that make sense for a situation and use them accordingly. This could be something as simple as having your camera ops change shooting style, or something like switching a portion of the song to black and white, and to simply stop everything because it's appropriate. Develop and hone the tools in your arsenal and design a plan for implementing them.
3) Direct for your audience
Before you start directing or training directors you have to know your audience because your audience is going to dictate your shot selection. In today's churches it is possible to have four audiences; your main audience in the room, overflow room, multisite, and streaming/video on demand (VOD) watching over the internet. Ideally you would have a different look and style for each audience, but we all know how very rarely anything in church tech world is ideal. More likely, you will direct your camera work for one audience and make it work for the others. The differences are subtle, but they focus around what your audience needs to see. A perfect example of audiences being in conflict is the VOD audience versus main room audience. For the VOD audience it's important to include camera shots that establish the room and the people in it. However if you are sitting in the main room you never need those shots. It's important to distinguish between these to styes of directing because the quality of a church's online presence is often directly correlated to their reach and overall attendance.
So it would be plausible that you could direct your IMAG in more of a broadcast style for use in the main room, so that the end result is friendlier for online consumption. Why would this be a good idea? Imagine you have an auditorium of 1,000 people, but you have an online viewership of 4,000, if your church had a goal similar to the church I work for, then it would make sense to sacrifice the in-the-room audience for the online viewership. That is a super oversimplification for example only. More likely you will blend the two formats together, but be aware by doing so you will be neither really well. However, if you have a good recording of your service, you are going to distribute it regardless of what audience it was intended to suit, so I suggest you take a hard look at the audience you intend to watch your IMAG and adjust accordingly.
4) Clear Communication
Communication is one of the harder things to learn when it comes to directing; when you are communicating you need to get as much information in as few words as possible. So it's important that you be able to speak quickly, but not sound panicked, because panic is contagious. If your operators hear in your voice that you are struggling or scared, they will struggle and be scared. You must remain calm and confidently in control and your voice will be the only tool you have to make sure your people know this. Many times this “Command Voice” comes across terse and mean, so you need make sure you cultivate a culture of communication where this is the norm. If everyone is familiar with your command voice then it won't freak people out or hurt their feelings when you use it with them. The easiest way to combat this is to have people watch a service from inside your control room, let them hear it for themselves and let them see that your team finds comfort in your firm command and is not scared into action.
There is an old saying “never let them see you sweat.” When you are directing it's really more like “never let them hear you doubt.” It's important to know how to speak with authority, never give a direction that ends with a question. As a director you never ask anyone to do anything, you command it, always. There is a drastic difference between “Roll video?” and “Roll Video!” One will get you what you want, the other will get people confused because you are asking them something. However, it's hard to tell are you asking permission, are you asking if that is the right call, or are you asking to actually roll the video? It is the director's place to know what's happening, so make sure your commands are commands and your questions are questions. Everyone will be looking to you for leadership and you cannot let them down by commanding passively.
5) Constant Improvement
If you have been doing IMAG for a long time, then I challenge you to find a way to improve it in some small way. That could be something as small as training a volunteer to direct, or changing the training regiment you use for your camera operators to get a slightly different result, our cutting out some of your unnecessary communication. Also, if you aren't doing so already, find a way to record your monitor wall, intercomm, and stage mix, this is a great way to see what you are doing after the fact and figure out ways to improve it. One of the things you should be constantly doing is watching other church‘s monitor walls and comm feeds. Not for critique, but to see what someone else is doing and see of there is anything they do that might make a lot of sense in your environment.
A great example of this: I train my camera ops to always be moving, so for years every shot had some movement to it, mainly because I believed the best way to get motion and energy was on the camera end of the job. However, after watching some the behind the scenes videos from one of my fellow video directors I noticed his cameras were very static. He was creating movement and motion through his transitions, how fast he was going from camera to camera. Again neither is right or wrong, but after watching I deciding I really like the look of that style so I started training my camera ops to do it. This has become another tool in my arsenal of how we do IMAG, and that is what you should be focusing on: equipping yourself with as many tools as you can so that no matter what is happening on stage you have a way to make a meaningful translation to your IMAG. Also, strive hard to never let your IMAG become a distraction, otherwise your have defeated the purpose completely.
Editor's note: We came across an example of some excellent video directing at LakePointe Church in Rockwall, Texas in the following video. We want to recognize the folks at Sennheiser who made us aware of this video. LakePointe recently installed 150 channels of Sennheiser wireless. For more info,
Find a church that does what you want to do and ask them how and why they do it.
