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Church Video Ideas: Training: Gotta Have It!

Orginally published on Tuesday, July 24, 2007 at 7:31 PM
by Greg Atkinson

It is summer and a great time to rally the troops and offer some training sessions for various areas of your Technical Arts Ministry. I’ve seen one of two things happen countless times in churches around the country. Either they have great equipment, but haven’t trained their team properly on it or they have done a good job training, but don’t have good equipment/tools. I wrap up the last observation fairly quickly – invest in the best equipment that your church can get. Even the best technicians can sound bad on poor equipment.

For the rest of the article, I’d like to just focus on the discipline of continually offering training throughout the year. As I mentioned in the beginning, summer is a great time to offer training. This summer at my church, I’m offering training sessions for our video directors, camera operators, graphic operators and lighting. Last week we had our training for all our video directors. It was a success and something that was welcomed by each participant. They had been flying solo since the role was created and never properly trained. I’ve been at my church for 5 months and am trying to change that.

Besides the relational/social aspect of our training session last week, we were able to have a great discussion on what is the correct way to video direct. We talked through protocol, proper technique, professional shot terms and how to call shots, as well as guidelines and procedures for regular things that occur at our church and are unique to our church (every church will have some of these). We also talked about their role as a leader and how they are to encourage and lead the camera and graphic operators.

I sensed such a relief from my team and joy that they were being taught by professionals on how to act and direct professionally. I had asked 2 pros on our team to help me lead the training session and give direction as to how things work in the world of TV and professional video production. I think it’s important that our video directors can step in with any team and be able to use proper terminology – not just make up some way to call shots that is unique to our team. This theory was proved when one of our video directors was asked to video direct a Willow Creek conference in Germany. Because he knew proper techniques and terminology, he had no problem working with a crew that he had never worked with before.

Besides socializing, talking about things that are unique to our church and learning industry standard/professional terms and procedures, we also had a hands-on training time. For this first training session, we worked on keying lower thirds and allowed each person a chance to sit at the desk and key lower thirds over live video. Now that all our video directors know and feel comfortable keying, there’s no turning back. We’ve taken the next step in quality and a created some great looking lower thirds, which we used this past Sunday. I was very pleased with this first training session and look forward to coaching our camera operators on how to go to the next level at our next training session in a couple of weeks.

Greg Atkinson lives in Dallas with his wife and their three small children. Greg served previously as the Director of WorshipHouse Media, after having served as a worship pastor for 11 years. Greg is now the Technical Arts Director at Bent Tree Bible Fellowship and continues to consult, teach and write about worship, media and creative communication. You can connect with him through his daily blog, Church Video Ideas, his podcast, Creative Synergy, or his email: .

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