Saddleback Church's outdoor venue in Dana Point, California
With more worshippers online than ever before, churches are challenged with creating a Christmas experience for both live and online audiences. The ever-growing post-pandemic model of having both a live service and an online audience is being called hybrid church, and it has brought new challenges for church leaders and production designers alike.
The hybrid model is especially challenging for lighting and set designers, mostly because the camera lens sees things differently than the human eye. Plus, the remote viewer processes things differently watching a video screen than they would in a traditional worship space. These and other factors present a puzzle that lighting designers, set designers, and video directors must work together to solve in order to provide the best possible online and live church experiences. This year’s Christmas productions will put these teams to the test.
Making live services work in concert with an online broadcast is not a problem reserved for large churches with similarly large production budgets. In fact, most of the issues presented by the growing audience of online worshippers are the same whether your church has two cameras or 10. And while the initial challenges of getting your services online might have seemed to be primarily technical, the challenges have proven to be as much about understanding the online viewer: their expectations, how to reach them, and how to retain them. A key ingredient is lighting.
In the frame
In addition to many years of experience as a still photographer, videographer Chuck Fishbein has been both on staff at Hope Community Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, during the pandemic and a consultant for the church’s growing online community. When he presents ideas about improving video at worship seminars, he physically holds up a picture frame to reinforce, in a most dramatic way, how a video perspective is different from that of a live experience. “People in the room can see what is going on around them and maintain a sense of what is in the room,” he says, “but the camera offers up only what is in the frame. It’s what is in the frame that counts.”
Fishbein reminds us that the framing that the camera imposes is not the only difference. “Different color temperatures that result from different lighting sources can work in the room,” he says, “but not with the camera.” He explains how stage and concert lighting, while powerful tools for the room, can fail in front of a camera. “Lighting designers can use the low light of a candlelight service for a dramatic effect when the people are live, but cameras need light to render a good image.”
To guarantee technically successful shots and continuity, Fishbein worked with the Hope Community Church production crews to get the set and lighting right for important parts of worship to be on camera. In addition, the video team utilizes a graphic bumper of sufficient length in order to get the pastor in place, giving plenty of time to nail lighting and focus for the upcoming segment. “The camera can no longer be an afterthought,” he says. “For many things that happen on stage, a miscue is not so bad because a live stage is forgiving,” he notes. “But on camera, miscues are amplified, and can mean a missed moment; a lost connection with the viewer. So, what used to be Christmas skits blocked for the stage need to be restructured to be more cinematic, properly lighted, and held to a higher standard.”
Anticipating peak attendance for in-person and online viewers for Christmas services, Hope Community’s video director, Sarah Fishbein, reminds her teams that while holiday productions tend to swell with the grandeur of the season, it is important to stay focused, remain Jesus-centered, and act in accordance with the church’s core values. “Christmas week will see record attendance numbers,” she says, “but some of our busiest weekends are traditionally the first part of January.” In these numbers, she believes are people who were moved by what was perhaps their first visit and have returned to relive the experience. “Reaching them,” she offers, “is about continuity. We’re not finished when Christmas is over.”
Clean excellence
Phillip Braddock knows something about reaching for a higher standard for worship lighting. As central lighting director at Church of the King in Louisiana, he oversees campus locations in that state, as well as in Mississippi and Georgia. He and his lighting crews struggled during the pandemic until they began employing a practice of “clean excellence.”
For several months after the pandemic protocols sent people home, Braddock and his teams tried to figure out how to best adapt. “We reached out to other churches to seek help,” recalls Braddock, “and asked them about their experience going online. `What was hard?’ and ‘What successes have you had?’ We learned that when it comes to detail, the camera is just unforgiving. It will see everything that you don’t.” This is why Braddock believes that the answer to better online production is in unwavering attention to the details. Some of the team’s most significant improvements, and ones that his team will use for Christmas sets this season, have been achieved by employing video panels on stage to eliminate the black space that flanked the church’s centrally placed 16-foot by 9-foot screen. To give the stage a more video-friendly look, Braddock uses video elements built with over 90 2.9mm panels as set pieces. This gives whatever is placed on the church’s large (80-foot by 60-foot) stage better definition, both for live presentations as well as on screen. “The video panels are both visually interesting and serve the purpose of breaking things up on camera,” he says.
“We made a decision not to fight it (working with all the natural light outdoors), but rather ‘lean into it.’”
God’s lighting design
Saddleback Church’s Lake Forest is a hub for over a dozen campuses, and its location in sunny Southern California provided an ideal space to move services outside when the pandemic hit. “Moving services to a central outdoor area we call ‘Central Park’ allowed our services to continue,” recalls Saddlebacks Lighting Designer Jacob Olson, “but it obviously presented some significant challenges for lighting.” Olson had to work closely with set designers to create balance employing shaded areas and adding lighting fixtures to create an even look for video. “We made a decision not to fight it (working with all the natural light outdoors), but rather ‘lean into it,’” he recalls. “We began looking at obstacles as opportunities and, through the process, found places where our online was good, but maybe not great. Now, we are making it great.”
Olson will employ much of what has been learned in this year’s Christmas services which will be the first to take place in the church’s newly remodeled worship center. The renovation has modified the structure’s massive windows into giant doors that will offer worshipers a new vibrant space not unlike an amphitheater. “Our space has always been bright and clean,” he says, “but now we’ll be working even more with nature, creatively using our lighting to keep artistry and color in our sets. It goes with our motto to ‘capture beautiful things.’
”As for most churches, the new focus on video for online worship has significantly altered Olson’s expectations for lighting design. “We are not leaving the pandemic as we entered,” he says. “We know that we are going to carry our ‘pandemic discoveries’ forward as part of Saddleback Church’s evolution. We’ve made it happen outside, now we are just adding walls and plaster, so our services will still feel open-air with more natural light. It’s brought us into a new era.”
The online opportunity
This Christmas season, Braddock’s lighting team at Church of the King will be giving equal time to its video campus. “We want to treat online like the huge opportunity it is.” Braddock acknowledges that online services do lack an important human connection, but he believes that many attending online this year will be like “the person in the last row—maybe nervous, maybe just trying it out.” And he closes, “Online allows all to join,” and hopefully to come back in person as a result.
