7 Team-Targeted Actions for Capturing Christmas
- Evaluate your unique needs for IMAG live streaming and cinematic capture at your main Christmas worship experiences.
- Take stock of your resources from personnel to gear to infrastructure.
- Communicate any anticipated limitations to your leadership team as early as possible. With enough lead-time, it’s entirely possible that they may free up additional resources if the needs are communicated compellingly..
- Develop a leadership plan coordinating with other stakeholders from your communications, film and worship team point people. This will ensure everyone’s on the same page with what success looks like before Christmas kicks off..
- Designate leaders and recruit teams for each aspect of what you’re capturing and/or producing. Ensure that no one person is carrying more responsibility than they can reasonably accomplish on the day of the worship experiences.
- Develop a plan for ensuring that all media files are quality-checked and backed up redundantly before packing it in on Christmas Eve.
- Make a plan to celebrate the wins with your leaders and volunteers in January. Get some party food, recognize the individual contributions of team members and block out a few minutes for post-game analysis and dreaming about how things could be even better next Christmas.
For majority of churches the world over, Christmas is one of the most important, if not the most important, seasons of the entire year. It’s a time that can bring out the best in the life of a congregation. It can reconnect the faithful to the miracle of the Gospel. And it can often serve as the single best opportunity to introduce new friends and family to a Christian community for the first time. Unfortunately for many in tech ministry though, Christmas also comes pre-loaded with its own set of unique demands and pressures. Too often the live experience crowds out other important considerations, such as how best to capture media of the Christmas experience and maximize its effectiveness. Developing a plan well ahead of time for ensuring your teams capture all of the video assets your ministry needs can pay big dividends after the last volunteer shuts off the last light on Christmas Eve.
21st-century Media Ministry Demands
As recently as a decade ago most church tech ministries could feel confident focusing the majority of their Christmastime efforts on producing the best live Christmas experience possible. But today, we live in a far more on-demand world. People looking to explore a product, service, experience or community begin that process online, using Google searches and social media as the fastest routes to the information they’re seeking. This paradigm shift means that effective tech ministries will need to realign their efforts with that kind of media content creation in mind. For many teams the first step on this journey is to reevaluate the effectiveness of the way the IMAG recordings of their primary Christmas worship experiences are captured and processed.
For instance, while your current approach to recording an IMAG feed may be adequate for archiving a worship service, the quality bar on these recordings might be below where it needs to be for video-on-demand (VOD) viewing by potential seekers. Given the way your particular target audience consumes media, additional post-service editing, color correction and audio mixing may be needed to put your best foot forward, especially with something as crucial as your Christmas experiences.
Live Streaming Christmas
Another area that may need special attention at Christmastime is the quality and effectiveness of your live stream. With the rise in popularity of social media live streaming, as well as streaming to third-party sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, it’s more important than ever that the programming of your stream is customized to ensure that new viewers are invited to take the next steps into deeper community connection. While it may be efficient to simply stream the video feed coming off your IMAG system and the audio feed from your house mix, approaching live streaming with this mentality often sacrifices important opportunities to build connection with your online audience. Planning for an effective Christmas live stream might include special hosted video segments, unique graphics and even camera angles designed to transition first-time visitors into second-time guests.Many of these improvements to a live stream experience are relatively simple to make with proper planning and development—and plenty of lead-time for execution. Things get more complicated, however, when leadership is asking questions about the media content capture plan for the first time on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.
A Cinematic Christmas
Another emerging approach to help ensure effective Christmas experience capture is to incorporate a unique team of cinematographers to film the event with large-sensor cameras, recording at high bit rates and utilizing narrative camera movements and techniques. Capturing this type of footage enables content creation with an artistic, narrative perspective, rather than the clinical, omniscient viewpoint that defines most good IMAG work. Instead of serving the immediate broadcast needs addressed by IMAG and streaming, cinematic footage is most effective when post-produced into projects like social media recap celebration videos, annual report videos and promotional materials for the following year’s Christmas experiences. With careful planning, this documentary-style footage can also capture unique moments and artistic expressions in-service, as well as vital behind-the-scenes glimpses that help build the long-term growth and development of a worship arts ministry.
Pulling Together A Plan
As mentioned earlier, oftentimes the difference between visually capitalizing on all the hard work of Christmas or missing that opportunity lies in the planning stages. Taking the time (in the beginning of October, ideally) to sketch out some plans and initiate a few strategic conversations can make all the difference in the world when it comes to ensuring that your team captures the media assets they’ll need moving forward.
Christmas is one of the most important seasons of the year, and elements like VOD, live streaming and social media content marketing aren’t showing signs of disappearing anytime soon. Taking the time to make sure you capture and archive your experiences well will pay off big in the months and even years to come, and can serve as a springboard for expanding the scope and effectiveness of your ministry moving into the future.
