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Church of the Highlands in Birmingham, Ala.
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Church of the Highlands generally uses High End Systems' Hog Series lighting consoles with fixtures from ETC, A.C. Lighting, Martin Professional and others.
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"A majority of our 14 campuses are run almost exclusively by volunteers," says Production Manager Justin Firesheets. "We need to make sure that our systems are simple so that a volunteer can understand them. We also need to make sure it’s consistent across the board in case we’re moving volunteers around from Point A to Point B."
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The worship department manages the audio team—a model favored by Senior Pastor Chris Hodges.
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Church of the Highlands generally uses High End Systems' Hog Series lighting consoles with fixtures from ETC, A.C. Lighting, Martin Professional and others.
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All production starts at the church's Grants Mill broadcast campus. After each service, video files are sent to the satellite locations via FTP. Sony HDC-2400 cameras with Canon 60x DigiSuper box lenses are used for video capture.
In February 2009, Justin Firesheets not only switched jobs, he made a major life change, as well.
Having gone to school for sports broadcasting, Firesheets began his career in the early 2000s, when live video streaming was in its infancy. He worked both in radio and television, eventually taking a position with the Barons, Birmingham, Ala.'s minor league baseball team, for whom he did marketing and media relations.
Firesheets isn't shy about declaring his love for sports (especially baseball), but he admits that after a number of years working in the industry, he felt it was time for something else. It was when he began studying John Bevere's “Driven by Eternity” teachings that this transformation started to take shape. “I was getting kind of frustrated by what I was doing, knowing that in the grand scheme of things it was pretty insignificant,” he relays. “I had felt this little nudge that said, ‘Hey, maybe you need to be working in ministry.'” The question was, doing what?
The answer came by way of a friend, who also happened to be the leader of Firesheets' “Driven by Eternity” study group. This friend was also working in the tech department at Church of the Highlands in Birmingham, which Firesheets himself began attending (and volunteering at) in 2003. It just so happened that another friend on staff was leaving Highlands for his home church in Louisiana, which meant there would be a job opening. But Firesheets wasn't sure he was a match: “I just didn't think that the live production world at Highlands was ever something that I would be a good fit for because my skill set didn't match what I felt they were doing behind the scenes in the live production world,” he remembers. His friend thought otherwise; upon submitting his resignation, he urged Highlands' leadership to consider Firesheets. They did, and a couple of months later, Firesheets was hired.
If Firesheets thought he didn't have the skills for live church production back then, he certainly does now. As Highlands' production manager, he oversees production operations for 14 campuses across Alabama. Grants Mill, the church's broadcast site in Birmingham, houses what the church regards as two campuses: a 2,400-seat sanctuary that also serves as a broadcast auditorium, as well as a 400-seat chapel on this site for more traditional live worship. (There is also an 800-seat, multipurpose venue used for service overflow.) Six additional campuses are spread out across the city and surrounding areas, and another six are in outlying cities. Of all of these campuses, two were built from the ground up, one was an existing church that was gifted to Highlands, and one was a reclaimed office building, while the rest are portable locations, with their congregations meeting in schools, conference facilities, and community centers.
"[COTH wants] all of their satellite campuses to have the same high quality experience that you would get at their broadcast campus. There’s A LOT of equipment that they like to standardize on."
Justin Firesheets
Production Manager, Church of the Highlands, Birmingham, AL.
Production Predictability
At Highlands, all production starts at the Grants Mill broadcast campus, which employs Haivision’s video software platform to deliver content to the other locations. These campuses can either take a live feed of the service that is taking place at Grants Mill, or delay it for a few minutes if required. After each service, the team in the broadcast auditorium transfers a service capture file to the satellite locations via FTP; if, for some reason, one of the campuses is unable to go live, they have the option of playing back a service from earlier Sunday morning. The catch? Highlands doesn’t hold Saturday services, so if a campus is running into problems during the first Sunday service, the crew on site either has to make a quick fix, or the campus pastor must deliver the message locally. The church has endeavored to curb delivery issues by installing its own Internet circuits at the bulk of its campuses, including most portable locations. This way, the team at Grants Mill can monitor the systems at the satellite campuses and perform any required maintenance before a failure occurs.
Built in mid 2007, Highlands’ broadcast campus has its own unique AV setup, but when it comes to the satellite locations, maintaining technological consistency is a primary goal. Most campuses feature an Avid Profile audio console, Meyer loudspeakers and subwoofers, High End Systems lighting consoles (either Full Boar 4s or Road Hog 4s), and Martin lighting fixtures. The larger venues are equipped with Barco projection, and the church uses a combination of Ross Carbonite and Sony switchers.
“[Highlands] has a really high quality standard—they want all of their satellite campuses to have the same high quality experience that you would get at their broadcast campus,” says Brandon Byrd, project manager at Clark, an AVL design/build firm headquartered in Atlanta that has enjoyed a longstanding relationship with the church. “There’s a lot of equipment that they like to standardize on.”
Highlands’ production department is staffed with 16 full-time employees who are responsible for live video and lighting. The worship department manages the audio team—a model favored by Senior Pastor Chris Hodges, according to Firesheets. “He has always had a very sensitive ear to sound quality, and he’s been very specific about what he wants the room to sound and feel like during the worship experience,” he explains. “And I believe, really, the crux of it is he understands how important the relationship is between the worship team on stage and the audio engineer. They have to be on the same page and they need to understand each other well.”
But regardless of whether it’s audio, video, or lighting, the equipment standardization at Highlands definitely streamlines maintenance and management. It also allows the church to leverage its pool of volunteers. “A majority of our campuses are run almost exclusively by volunteers—we don’t necessarily have staff people at every campus every week,” Firesheets relays. We need to make sure that our systems are simple so that a volunteer can understand them, and we also need to make sure it’s consistent across the board in case we’re moving people around from Point A to Point B. We want the setup to be as similar as possible so that people can be interchangeable if we need them to be.” This also facilitates training: Highlands volunteers learn how to operate these systems at regional training locations, instead of staff having to travel from campus to campus to get people up to speed.
Thinking Ahead
Highlands’ tech leadership doesn’t rely on these training sessions alone, however; Firesheets explains that the church has created detailed documentation that volunteers may refer to so that they can set up and perform minor troubleshooting before having to call upon a full-time staffer for assistance. “We have pre-service checklists everywhere for everything, because we don’t want to put somebody in a position where they’re having to remember what they’re supposed to do to get ready for the service,” he says. “We have a training outline so that if you’re learning a particular position, it doesn’t matter which of the 14 campuses you’re at, you’re learning it the same way and you’re getting evaluated the same way.” For Firesheets, this is the only way to properly manage a large team of volunteers at a church experiencing explosive expansion. “It became critical for us to make sure that we had a system in place that would allow us to scale for future growth,” he notes.
Firesheets argues that building a solid foundation that allows for scalability—both in terms of technology and human resources—is one of the production manager’s most important challenges at a growing church. “If you can’t manage two campuses, then you’re not going to be able to manage 20; and if you can’t manage 10 volunteers, you can’t manage 100,” he says.
After all, as impressive as some of today’s technology is, it can only be applied to its optimum if those operating it have the skills, confidence, and support to run it properly. “If I can’t do that now when I’m at the size I’m at now, then how in the world am I going to be able to do it when we have grown and I am so much busier, and I’ve got more stuff to deal with, and I’ve got to be in more places at one time?” Firesheets says. “Life is never going to slow down more than it is right now; you will never be less busy than you are right now. And so if you don’t have the systems in place now to support the growth, then it will be that much harder to go back and adjust to that down the road.”
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