Relying heavily on prerecorded audio and video segments distributed to its four locations, Village Church contacted Primacoustic (a division of Radial Engineering Ltd.), to improve the acoustic properties of the control room (above) and studio recording spaces (below).
Strategically located and available, movie theaters have become a viable option for churches looking for a place to meet on Sunday mornings and a great option for expanding video ministries to multiple campuses. Taking advantage of opposite schedules, comfortable seating, and a big screen, technology teams scramble each week to convert theaters into temporary sanctuaries, but the technology leaders at Village Church, a rapidly growing church based in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada, are now exploring a different approach to church in a cinema space that is really catching on.
New cinema concept
Village Church has increased to over 5,000 worshippers each week meeting in four rented venues in the Vancouver and Calgary areas, including two theaters and the 1,100-seat Bell Performing Arts Centre in Surrey. Church leaders are planning to expand to more theater spaces across Canada based on the recent success of the Cinema Site design. What makes the Village Church theater design for worship so different is the way the church has fully embraced the cinema space and cinematic concepts for worship. “The idea started with our Lead Pastor sitting in a theater, watching a movie, and thinking ‘Why couldn’t we just do a whole service this way—looking and sounding as good or better?’” recalls John Broadhead, Village’s lead executive pastor. “We got to thinking, ‘What if the church experience in a theater could become a window into a live service at a larger campus?’” When the idea was shared with other staff, especially those with strong technical backgrounds, the decision was made to run with it, expanding and refining the concept as they went.
After much experimentation, the team ultimately landed on a production design using a fully locked video shot throughout the service. The shot doesn’t move, essentially providing a window to a live worship experience—from watching stagehands make adjustments before a service to packing up gear at the end. “Developing a good working model took the better part of nine months from conception to having something we were happy with,” recalls Broadhead, “and allowed us to launch our first cinema venue with it in June of 2017.” What “sells” the concept for worshippers is the extent to which the production team has gone to make the cinema space a part of the worship experience. That includes putting a stage up in the room that matches the height of the front of the stage on screen, adding moving lights in the room that track to the same color as seen on screen, and leveraging the theater’s 5.1 surround sound audio to give sound in the theater the same ambience as the live venue.
Tight production team
Broadhead is well-suited to applying technology innovations, having had years of experience engineering at a space and defense technology firm. He also served as a vice president at Roland Corp. while concurrently being a worship leader, musician and part of the team that planted Village Church in 2010. Working alongside him at Village Church are Technical Director Isaac Wiebe and Village’s production manager, Greg Chapman, who have decades of experience in church technology and video production, respectively. Other key members of the team are Audio Engineer Josh Caspian, who produces the surround mix, and Video Services Director Andrew Learmonth who processes the video and produces the final product.
To support the production of recorded music and video, the church has designed a studio and production facility in rental space below its business offices. The studio features four primary spaces, the most important space reportedly being a 390-square-foot control room. “It is our hub for arranging Sunday’s material, pre-recording our own custom backing tracks, and also mixing a 5.1 recorded version for playback in our Cinema Sites,” says Broadhead. Additionally, Studio A, at 715 square feet, functions as a primary rehearsal space for musicians with full capability to multitrack a band. Studio B provides 550 square feet to record instruments individually, along with a songwriting corner and second DAW setup for demoing and editing.
“We got to thinking, ‘What if the church experience in a theater could become a window into a live service at a larger campus?’” John Broadhead, Lead Executive Pastor, Village Church, Surrey, BC.
Lastly, a vocal booth provides space for a number of vocal projects from recording vocals, to podcasting, to voiceovers for creative video content. To provide the best possible environment for recording and post production, Wiebe contacted Primacoustic (a division of Radial Engineering Ltd. of Port Coquitlam, BC), to improve the acoustic properties of the studio spaces and control room. James Wright, West territory manager for Primeacoustic, worked closely with General Contractor Kevin Koehn of Koehn Enterprises, Surrey, BC, to calculate and install the proper amount of acoustic treatment, including fabric covered acoustic wall panels with resin hardened edges made from six-pound high-performance glass wool. In addition, to improve accurate low-end response in the control room, bass traps were added under the console, at the front corners of the room, and at wall bottoms.
Workflow workings
The Village technical team has developed a production workflow for music and video that is used at the church’s cinema sites on Sunday mornings. The work starts a week before where a live service is carefully recorded at The Bell Performing Arts Centre. Approximately two and a half days are invested by the team in making the final product ready for Sunday morning.First, a live service, including 15 minutes on either end, is captured using a RED Epic-W digital cinema “brain” with a Helium 8K S35 sensor (shooting an 8K full-frame at 30 frames per second) equipped with a Canon CN-E 30-105mm T2.8 L S telephoto cinema zoom lens. Multi-channel audio is recorded to redundant Sound Devices 970 64-track MADI/Dante ethernet multitrack recorders. A click track is provided to aid tracking in post-production efforts.After capture, raw video is flown to the edit suite where it is graded and processed into either a 4K or 2K framing.
Concurrently, audio tracks are flown into the mixing suite where the music and speaking content are mixed and mastered in 5.1 surround sound. “Key to this mix is putting it in a sound space that will sound amazing with great live dynamics in a dry theater,” says Broadhead. The mastered 5.1 audio is then sent back to the video suite for the final product to be assembled and loaded onto drives. Playback at cinema sites utilizes a rack-mounted AJA Ki Pro Ultra 4K DCI/UHD recording and monitoring unit. An AJA FS1-X module provides connectivity to integrate localized inputs for the Site Pastor to use through the theater’s system. With the addition of the AJA FS1-X on site, the team is able to send the pre-recorded 5.1 audio from the AJA KiPro Ultra to a digital mixer and combine it with other local sources. The FS1-X then re-embeds it in the HDMI video stream, while maintaining a discrete 5.1 mix.
Meeting essential challenges
Broadhead and Wiebe offer three essential challenges the team had to overcome in leveraging a standard cinema theater to host a video-based church service: sharpness during capture, sufficient latitude during post-production, and the ability to convincingly combine live elements of worship with a recorded service.“Sharpness during capture is essential,” Wiebe says. He offers that the combination of a relative wide field of view and the pixel density of 2K across a 50-foot screen can leave very little margin to achieve a sharp captured image. To mitigate this the team sought out the highest resolution camera that they could afford and the sharpest lens available in the focal length they needed. A smaller (but essential) factor was finding a camera capable of capturing an uninterrupted half service of full-resolution RAW footage per card.
Production for the content shown at the multisites starts a week before. A live service is carefully recorded at The Bell Performing Arts Centre, then approximately two and a half days of post-production work are invested by the team in making the final product ready for Sunday morning.
Village Church’s approach pays particular attention to post-production. “The quality of the result will never exceed the quality of the source files,” notes Wiebe. “This means capturing files with a reasonable amount of fidelity and latitude, both audio and video.” Village captures RAW video files to maintain the greatest amount of dynamic range and grading flexibility. On the audio front, that means having a multitrack recording with the highest feasible sample rate and bit depth. “We chose the Sound Devices 970 set at 48 kHz/24-bit, specifically for its drive redundancy and multi-unit control,” he says.Even with great video and audio quality, combining live elements with a recorded service presents an obvious challenge. “This is the most critical technical contribution towards the success of our cinema sites,” says Broadhead. The church’s plan specifically calls for enabling the local site pastor to include live elements like communion, dedication, announcements, and even preaching from time to time, integrated with the pre-recorded service. “This brings an important dimension to the service,” he says, “but also presents a serious technical challenge since the majority of cinemas can only provide groups the most basic of audio and video inputs—usually only a single HDMI input. Using an AJA FS1-X on site solves the problem.”
Commitment to impact
To be successful, Broadhead and his team know they need to be committed to continuing to deliver high quality results and improving their process as technology changes. “There’s been a lot of experimentation, but we have gotten to a point now of being able to create an experience that has the same impact as any of our fully live sites.”Leveraging cinematic concepts for worship is at the heart of Village Church’s strategy to see many more locations open across the country in the next decade. “It’s great to see and hear the reaction to our efforts,” Broadhead says. “People get it, and we are seeing lots of buy-in.” As to the philosophy of cinema church he adds, “A church is its people, not the building or how services are executed. We consider Sundays to be a ‘front door,’ using that to invite people to be part of church the other six days of the week. The 65 minutes on Sunday morning can be experienced in a variety of ways.”
