12Stone Church has seven physical campuses in the Atlanta area, and has created 12Stone Home, the church’s online presence that also encourages group worship in attendees’ homes. The John Maxwell Leadership Center at 12Stone’s Sugarloaf Campus will be the host site for this summer’s Capture Summit and Church Filmcraft Festival, July 25-27, 2022. In this Five Minutes, we get to know the church’s creative director, Timmy Allen.
CPM: What is your creative background?
Allen: After high school, I was in a few bands and I was creating a lot of the merch and poster design, as well as customizing the CSS and layout of our MySpace page. Super cool stuff. I went to Full Sail University and got my bachelor’s degree in web design focusing in animation and Flash. Then the first iPhone came out and the slow death of the programming and application I love died, so I transitioned my love for animation to broadcast animation for shows and YouTube channels. At that time, my best friend (and brother-in-law), his brothers, and myself kicked off a YouTube show called Film Riot (which is still running to this day). Cut my teeth doing the animations and broadcast assets for that for a season. I’m still constantly freelancing and doing contract work for a list of clients I’ve grown relationships with over the years. Still focusing mostly on animation as my main artistic out. Whether it’s 2D or 3D or VFX, it’s my happy place and I love being able to get my hands dirty doing good projects with good people.
“I’m also super into building and maintaining a healthy creative and team culture and setting the team up to be as free as possible to succeed and create.”
CPM: When did you realize your talents would be used working for the Church?
Allen: I remember being in youth group doing announcement videos and other little videos about whatever we could convince our youth pastor was a cool idea at the time, with my group of friends for fun thinking how cool it’d be to do this for a living. But never actually thinking that it was a real job. Plus, I was way more interested in being a rock star. #priorities. So, I let that dream kind of die for a good long while, as I pursued music. Later I was in a place of stress financially, having just graduated from art school with a six-figure debt. I was praying for some kind of relief or solution, when I got a random call from the creative director at Christ Fellowship asking if I could come in just to do some work alongside them. Then that turned into an opportunity to step into a full-time position. It was one of those things where at the time, doing Film Riot and other things, I never thought full-time creative ministry could be a viable option, and there it was. God placed it right in front of me and answered a prayer. Now I’ve been in ministry for almost 13 years.
CPM: What are your responsibilities as creative director at 12Stone?
Allen: I’m specifically over film, design, and animation. With the help of my team (both above and below me), I help create and shape our unique creative voice that is seen and heard in the kinds of stories we tell and art we make. Setting up opportunities to look ahead at our master calendar and producing opportunities to ideate and pitch films and other kinds of creative content. I’m also super into building and maintaining a healthy creative and team culture and setting the team up to be as free as possible to succeed and create.
CPM: What did the pandemic teach you and your team about content creation?
Allen: It taught us that digital is 100% viable as a way to do church (obviously with some fundamental foundation and instruction). We laugh from time to time when looking back at the end of 2019. We knew that a lot of churches were transitioning their experience over to a digital offering to serve those who were on sites like YouTube looking for answers to spiritual questions. So, we started to come up with a strategy to move into a digital space. If I’m remembering it correctly, there were three phases that spanned something like five years to get to a full online experience. A few months later, the campuses were shut down and we had taken that three-phase plan and put it into place in something like two or three weeks. It wasn’t the best thing ever, but it worked and we were super proud of it. Then, after a few months, we polished it up and made it something that is now (two years later) a pivotal pillar in how we do ministry here. It’s where our 12Stone Home expression was born and developed.
CPM: The 12Stone stage has production sets on either side. Can you tell us what those are used for?
Allen: Our Sugarloaf campus is also our “broadcast campus,” which means it’s where all our campuses get their teaching, including our 12Stone Homes. The idea behind the side sets was to bring some of the living room, finished basement, park, taproom, barn experience into their weekend experience itself. It was a way to visually relate and bring home the live experience. The geniuses in our production department built those sets as something we could reframe and redesign on a dime, week to week if we needed. If we felt like we needed something that feels like a coffee shop or a taproom, we could quickly strip and rebuild the set to speak right to that unique 12Stone Home experience.
CPM: What’s your favorite piece of gear and why?
Allen: I’m an animator by trade. I’ve done some film stuff, and geek out over all sorts of things that I see the guys and girls here get, like new cameras, new lights, new monitors, you name it. But, being an animator and someone who does a good bit of 3D animation inside of real-time environments, my favorite piece of gear is something I don’t own yet, the HTC Vive Mars CamTrack system. The all-in-one plug and play box that brings your real-life camera/lights/real-life props/etc. into a virtual set with little to no setup or code. I’m super stoked to get my hands on that when it becomes a thing. But my RTX 3090’s are pretty sweet too. They not only render my 3D work lightning-fast, but they make Elden Ring and Halo Infinite look and run FANTASTIC.
CPM: 12Stone is hosting the Capture Summit in July. What are you (and your team) looking forward to bringing to the event?
Allen: Honestly, we’re just stoked to have so many other passionate creatives around. We’re big collaborators and since COVID and separation collaboration and outside our team stuff went down, we just haven’t been around a lot of other groups of people. So, it’ll be really great to be in the same space as other excited creatives talking about creative things and how those could intersect with how we do ministry. It’s an honor to be able to host and we can’t wait to meet everyone and do our best to show y’all a good time.
For more information about 12Stone Church, visit https://12stone.com/.
For more information about Capture Summit, visit https://capturesummit.com/.
