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LCBC Church - Branchcreek Campus.
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The LCBC production team likes to have at least three weeks to deliver content for a service. Planning for Christmas began in late September.
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"Most of the LCBC satellite campuses are identical in terms of lighting rigs." - Tim Moser, Production Designer, LCBC, Manheim, PA.
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Left to right: Tim Moser, production designer; Ryan Geesman, video production director and Sean McDermott, production manager are three of 20 technical staff members LCBC employs across its eight campuses.
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"We all have a voice here. It's not that everyone always agrees with everyone, but we have a culture where disagreeing isn't a bad thing." - Ryan Geesaman, Video Production Director, LCBC, Manheim, PA.
Editor's Note: Article originally ran in the December 2015 issue of Church Production under the title "Changing Lives Across the Keystone State."
There are a variety of approaches churches take when planning their Christmas holiday services. Some go all-out creating a special Christmas production; some do very little and the Christmas holiday is treated the same as any other weekend service. Lives Changed By Christ Church (LCBC), based in Manheim, Pa., takes an approach that falls about halfway between the two extremes.
“Our senior pastor has described our Christmas gatherings as ‘not a pageant or show, but a weekend gathering on steroids,'” says Production Manager, Sean McDermott. “We keep our typical weekend gathering flow with energy focused on ensuring the gathering captures and engages our church community, as well as their guests. Whereas in our normal weekend gatherings we will produce one video and sync it to music our bands play live, for Christmas 2014 we synced three videos.”
“Christmas and Easter are the two most-attended services of the year,” adds Video Production Director, Ryan Geesaman. “It's our opportunity to introduce people to Christ and the church. The idea behind not doing anything out of the ordinary is to introduce them to what we do every weekend of the year. Our members can say to their guests, ‘This is what we do every week.' Our goal is to keep them coming back and [help them] develop a relationship with Christ.”
Over the past 24 years, LCBC has grown under the leadership of Senior Pastor, David Ashcraft from a congregation of 150 people to over 14,000 people attending one of seven campuses spread across central and eastern Pennsylvania each weekend. Each remote campus presents the same service elements with live worship, whereas the message portion of the service is transmitted via satellite from the Manheim campus.
Working with Geesaman and McDermott each week to make the services happen is Tim Moser, production designer for LCBC.
“I was raised in the Methodist church,” comments Moser, “but walked away from it as a youth. When I went to college I had plans of becoming a lawyer, but quickly realized it wasn't a career I would enjoy. I decided to take a stagecraft course and was bitten by the theater bug. When I worked on a production of Jesus Christ Superstar, it raised questions in my mind that kept nagging at me. I eventually met the woman who would become my wife and she helped bring to completion the path to Christ that had started when working on that theatrical production.”
Christmas 2014
“Often what we do is come up with a theme for the Christmas season,” says Geesaman. “Whether that's a literal theme or a subtle theme, we all keep it in mind as we plan. Last year, the theme was ‘From White to Light.' When people walked in, they saw a lot of white. Then throughout the service we moved from white to brilliant light and color.
“How that ended up playing out was we started with a white silhouette of a tree,” he continues. “We brought that graphic element into all the printed materials, and for the actual gathering, we had physical white branches in the atriums, in the rooms, and on the stages of all of the auditoriums that were uplit with LED fixtures.”
“We wanted to build a forest of white birch trees to put into all the atriums of the various campuses,” adds Moser. “However, there are not many birch trees in our area. So, we needed to make birch trees. With seven campuses, it was too much for a central team to handle, so we needed to come up with a way to make the trees, write up directions and send them to each campus so they could reproduce the concept on their campus.”
LCBC opened their Christmas service with a video that used creative After Effects work to have someone “light writing” the image of a tree. “This is something you might see someone do using a still photo,” describes Geesaman, “but we did it with video and After Effects.”
"It’s not a pageant or a show, but a weekend gathering on steroids."
Ryan Geesaman
Video Production Director, LCBC, Manheim, PA.
On stage they lit the trees with white light at the start, and transitioned throughout the service to everything lit brightly with color. “This engaged the audience and made them feel like everything belonged,” says Geesaman. “It took them on a journey where everything played a part in the story.”
After the opening video, they did a performance musical piece, and then went into a three-song worship set: “Angels We Have Heard On High”, “I Will Look Up” and “O Come Let Us Adore Him.”
“We then showed a life-change story as a video interview,” continues Geesaman. “We do those often, to keep the idea of life change in front of the congregation frequently.”
“We always tell the Christmas story at some point in the service,” says Geesaman. “The big thing for us last year was that this part was really different. We created a video that had very little audio to it. It was practically silent. You might hear ambient noise—the bleating of sheep, for example. The Christmas story was conveyed through text on the screen. We did a lot of time-lapse video, and rented a motion control device so we could have nice motion through the time lapse. It was a very poetic presentation that kept people's attention.”
Creating the Visuals
Video production plays a key role in the technical ministries at LCBC, with produced video used in every service, as well as in promotional pieces and other ministries.
“On Mondays our director of programming and worship pastor meet with the speaker for an upcoming weekend service,” says Geesaman. “From that meeting we find out about the upcoming needs. On Tuesdays we do creative breakout meetings, with the group changing from week to week based on who is available. This includes graphic designers, artists and worship leaders. We meet in groups and brainstorm how to meet the needs. Ideally, we like to have three weeks from when we learn about what is needed to when we need to deliver it. For Christmas, we start having discussions around the end of September.”
Geesaman and his team depend on Canon equipment for the bulk of their video capture work. “For many years we've used Canon 7D and 5D DSLRs. We recently acquired a Canon C100 cinema camera, which has been great. Having the professional audio built into the camera is a huge help. We've just started talking about possibly acquiring a Sony 4K camera, so we can get both wide and close-up shots from the same footage by cropping into the 4K frame.”
Geesaman edits using Adobe Creative Cloud applications, which includes Premiere and After Effects.
“On the post-production side,” Geesaman adds, “one tool I really love is iZotope's RX software for audio repair. It does a fantastic job removing noise, de-clipping audio, and even removing reverberation. And Neat Video's video noise removal tool does a great job of cleaning up footage shot in low light situations.”
Live Video
With six campuses relying on a quality video feed from the central Manheim campus, live video plays an important role. Ikegami HDK-95C video cameras are used to capture broadcast-quality video from the main service, and they are equipped with Fujinon lenses: two XA55x9.5BESM box lenses and one XA22x7BES compact studio box lens.
“The lenses feel like a complete partner with the new Ikegami camera bodies,” says McDermott. “The look, control and function of the lenses are seamless with the camera. I know we'll be using these lenses for the next decade.”
Ross switchers and Barco FLM, RLM, and HDX projectors are used throughout the various campuses to bring the video to the audience. “We've had some pieces of Ross equipment in place for 10 years without any issues,” McDermott notes.
“Since 2013 we've been broadcasting via satellite to our remote campuses,” he adds. “We send two synchronized video feeds—one of side screen IMAG content and the other a lockdown image with a 24-foot-wide shot of the stage—and eight discrete channels of audio over the stream. Our Ikegami cameras are switched with a 3ME Ross Acuity Switcher. This is encoded over an International Datacasting Titan Encoder in our master control suite then sent to the campuses over an 18 Mbps satellite feed. The feed is decoded at the campuses and recorded on a local DVR. The DVRs enable live playback or a time-slip so gatherings can start at different times or campuses can flex the time before the message.”
Sound Reinforcement
For audio, the campuses use a variety of Yamaha CL and Avid Profile digital consoles with Clair Brothers PA systems, based in nearby Lititz, Pa., and powered by Lab.gruppen PLM amplifiers. “The Avid Profile consoles are especially helpful for us around Christmas,” says McDermott, “with their streamlined approach to plug-ins and ability for virtual sound check. This enables us to dial in any special audio effects and continue building the mix without the band needing to be on stage.”
Stage Lighting
For lighting, Moser uses an MA Lighting grandMA console at the Manheim campus for programming the service. “Our rig at this campus consists largely of about 550 ETC Source Four and Source Four PAR fixtures,” describes Moser. “We have 20 Rosco iCue moving mirrors attached to 20 of the ellipsoidals to give us the ability to aim the beam from the console. Eighteen Clay Paky Golden Scan intelligent fixtures provide some effect capabilities, and we have some Elation Tri-Bricks for LED color-changing lighting.”
Once the Manheim room is programmed, Assistant Lighting Designer Maureen Yoder programs lighting for the remote campuses. “Most of the satellite campuses are identical in terms of lighting rigs,” Moser says. “Maureen uses Cast Software's WYSIWYG lighting visualization software to program the service for those campuses, which gets it about 90% there. The campuses might have to tweak it a little to work perfectly, but most of the work is done.”
Making it all Work
“The culture here is very healthy,” Geesaman adds. “People tend to stick around here. I've had the opportunity to hire the five people I work with on my team, and I'm happy to say I've had no turnover. We all have a voice here. It's not that everyone always agrees with everyone, but we have a culture where disagreeing isn't a bad thing. There's a level of respect here, where you can have a disagreement and still be all on the same page. Relationships with each other don't suffer from disagreements. We like each other and like working together.”
