Image courtesy of Hope Community Church, Raleigh, NC.
To say the pandemic is changing church would certainly be an understatement. But as everyone is starting to “get back to normal,” many church technical artists say it will be a new normal. During a recent Church Production Magazine DAVE.Video interview about lighting, hosted by CPM Editor and Publisher Brian Blackmore, three guests talked about how recent changes to church tech are likely to stay --- and that’s a good thing.
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Chuck Fishbein of Hope Community Church in Raleigh, North Carolina says with so many new attendees watching services online, it changes the demographic of viewers of in-house content creation. “The media we are creating now has to compete for people’s attention. It used to be we produced intros, bumpers, and testimonials for sermon series shown only in church. Now our videos are out there for everyone and it’s increased the production quality. Even basic YouTube videos these days are well lit and well produced and we are in competition with that.”
Josh Etheridge from Blueridge Community Church in Forest, Virginia agrees. He says before the pandemic their online services were not very high quality and were seen as simply a window to what went on in church. Now he says what they put on the internet is thought of as its own online campus. “Before we were creating videos to bring people into church. Now we are creating videos so that someone has an experience with God right then and there.”
Before the pandemic, many churches were producing videos designed to bring people into the church. Now, online church campuses are being produced to help people to experience God right where they are. Learn more in this video interview with two church filmmakers about what's changed since early 2020.
And because of this, the quality of online church content is becoming more important than ever. Fishbein says, “It’s important to have things like quality lighting we can control and do things with. We want lighting we can sculpt with, that sets the mood of a picture and affects the mood of people watching... You’re trying to make them feel something.”
Etheridge agrees. He runs his own commercial production company, while co-leading the BR film team at Blue Ridge Community Church. “I see what happens on these commercial shoots in New York and elsewhere. The amount of thought and effort that goes into their work that doesn’t make a difference in the world when it’s for a hair product or for shoes --- yet the church impacts all of eternity.”
Fishbein says he and his wife found church production while working commercial video in New York. They saw a church’s poorly produced video about an orphanage in Nairobi. “And we said how do you expect to raise funds with this video? And before we knew it, we found ourselves in Nairobi shooting video!” But Fishbein concedes that churches don’t have commercial budgets and have greater accountability to spend wisely, so they have to find quality products with budget-friendly price tags, which is why he’s a fan of Nanlite lighting equipment. “The Forza 60 is our Swiss Army Knife. We use that for almost everything, everywhere. You throw three of them in a bag and jump on a plane or get in a car. They’re so small and do so much and they put out an amazing amount of light. They really have become the go-to tool to be on the go.”
Etheridge is also a fan of Nanlite. "Our go-to so far, for a beauty-style interview lighting, is we'll do a larger soft box overhead. I’ve got the Forza 300 in one of those 120 parabolics and so we’ll put that overhead and to hit the extra shine we’ll put the Forza 60 with snoot it in and literally open face and get a slight bit of shine on front of the face to create some more shape.”
Wayne Schulman, a VP at Nanlite, adds, “For us designing products that only the shoe manufacturers can afford is not the direction we want to go. Being able to allow people like you (Josh and Chuck) to afford multiple lights on hand when they get that inspiration is really what we design our products for, to be owned and truly operated.”
Etheridge says inspiration can lead to chaos. “We find ourselves getting this creative momentum and it’s this chaotic studio space; like one minute it’s this perfectly clean studio and five minutes later like [all the gear] is out and we’re experimenting. There are a number of Nanlights on our list because they’re compact, easy-to-use variable color temperatures and high CRI values – all the technical stuff that you’d want.”
Schulman says the pandemic has created an explosion in lighting sales for many reasons, including church production. “Content creators want to up their game,” he says. “We stepped up production on several products sooner than we thought we would because of this. We came out with the snoots and projection mounts sooner than we thought we would. We’re rolling out new products over the next three months sooner than we thought we would because of the explosion. And I don’t think it’s so much new products but added features and new modifiers we’ve put into the products.”
Shulman concludes, saying if Nanlite brings quality and affordability together in the lights, then churches can have the production values they want and money left that can be spent somewhere else.
