When it comes to doing production in the local church, there are a few guarantees: your budget isn't big enough; there's a new service each weekend; you'll need to pull out all the stops for Christmas and Easter. Pulling off live events is what we do. However, for many of us, we don't have any formal training in producing these large events, except by doing. As a result our event planning skills are only as good as the last one we did. Hopefully as you go, you are learning along the way and not repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
I've been a part of just about every Christmas production at whatever church I've been a part of for as many Christmases as I can remember. Unfortunately, that's becoming a larger and larger number. Large special events are in my blood. Whether it's as a shepherd or FOH engineer, scenic designer or production manager, I've been through enough to know that it is a lot of work, regardless of my role or the size of the church I was a part of at the time.
As someone on the production side of the equation, when I think back on all the big events I've participated in, I most often remember the process and the planning side of the event, and less so the event itself. I think this speaks to how important the process of getting to the big event can be. Which means it is something we should perhaps pay more attention to and make a concerted effort to get right.
While I wouldn't say I've figured everything out, I would say I've seen a few things work, and I've seen more things not work. As you get ready to plan your next big event, regardless of the size of your church or the production you are attempting to pull off, hopefully these insights will help you have a great experience.
At what are you aiming?
There have been too many times when an event got away from us months before it ever happened, simply because we hadn't looked at the calendar and come up with a plan for how we would get to the end goal.
As Zig Ziglar famously said: “If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.”
For us at Willow Creek, we try to start by working backwards from whenever the event is. For the Leadership Summit, we know what the event dates are, so we start figuring out the days and weeks before the event.
How many rehearsals do we need?
When do we need to white balance the cameras?
When will lighting have a dark room to program?
When does the set need to load in?
Getting the idea people and the executers of the idea in a room together helps us feel great about where we are going, together...
How long does the lighting rental need to be for? When does that load in?
When does set construction need to start?
When do we need to have sign off on the set?
When is the budget approved?
When we sit down to pick dates for all these things, it helps us know what to shoot for. Do we hit every deadline? No. But at least we know when we are missing our ideal target. The goal of putting each significant milestone into a calendar is that we want to have steady and constant pressure applied to planning the event, instead of a mad scramble at the end because we weren't disciplined along the way.
Since I come at event planning from the production perspective, I know our tendency is to want to nail everything down and become somewhat inflexible with deadlines. The challenge for us is that the creative process isn't as black and white as figuring out how many light fixtures you need, or how much lumber the set will require. As a result, it is very important to not establish a production schedule in a vacuum. It must be a collaborative process with your content creators. Without buy in from that part of the team, it doesn't matter how detailed your calendar is, your plan will be useless.
Having a schedule is great. Figuring out how much you have to spend—and then figuring out how expensive the ideas are—is really the next big challenge.
When out-of-the-box thinking and reality collide I don't know about you, but we usually have a budget amount given to us at the beginning of the year. It doesn't matter what the big idea for that event might end up being, that's the budget we get to work with. It's not a difficulty, it's an opportunity.
There are two large issues I have with this dilemma. When you already know what you have (or don't have) to spend, it becomes difficult to dream big. Then once the idea is out there, making it fit into the budget you have can be tricky.
In any creative process, there needs to be freedom to think outside the box, with relatively no concern for constraints. Many times these ideas can lead to other ideas that are actually doable. Yet, most production people I know love to solve problems, and because we tend to understand the constraints, this blue sky-type brainstorming usually looks like us explaining why something is a bad idea. Too expensive. Outside our knowledge base. Too dangerous. In the early stages of idea generation, this is not helpful.
There needs to be a certain amount of the schedule that is available to “the sky's the limit” ideas. Without this freedom, it can be difficult to come up with anything. If all I can think about is what I can't do, I'll probably not come up with very good ideas.
Going back to the idea of establishing a schedule, we need to put a deadline on limitless thinking. At a certain point we need to get down to what things will actually cost and what's doable.
Over the last few years, we have landed on a great way to dive into the reality conversation together.
The production team, along with the creative arts team, breaks the big idea down into various components. Things like light vortex, spinning stage, environmental projection, surround sound, in the round, lighting rental, scenic budget. The production team then goes after what each of these things might cost. We aren't trying to figure out every little detail, but we are just trying to get a ballpark number.
Once we gather all this data, the key decision makers sit in a room and we write down all the elements and how much each will cost on the whiteboard. Somewhere else we write the amount we actually have to spend: our target budget. From there we start prioritizing each idea, then brainstorming other ways to create the same effect for less money. By the end of the meeting time, we've hopefully brought our big idea into line with the time and money we have available.
The most important part of this meeting is that the technical arts and the creative arts are sitting in a room together trying to develop a plan, together. Instead of the production person just saying that's too expensive, we can talk about what is most important and figure out a way to make it happen, together. Getting the idea people and the executers of the idea in a room together helps us feel great about where we are going, together; it helps us get on the same page about what we are doing and what we aren't doing, together.
As the production guy, it can be exhausting to be the one always saying, “No, we can't do that,” or “Our budget isn't big enough for that idea,” or "No, we don't have enough time to get that done.” With us making decisions together, I'm suddenly a part of a team instead of feeling like the one who is always tearing apart someone's idea.
Start the day after your next special event.
In reality, our holiday services and special events are just really big versions of what most of us are doing each week. And in reality, if you want your big event process to be better, it more than likely involves improving your process for your weekly events.
Start figuring out what your normal schedule should look like, so that you know what your weekly deadlines are. Work together with your creative arts team to figure out what can and can't be done each week.
Building a structure to accomplish your big events is important and necessary. Building the relationship with your creative arts counterparts is more important and more necessary.
Don't wait until your next big event, start to build your processes and relationships now, so that when the event comes you have something that withstands the stress that comes along with each big event.
