What are you doing in ‘lock-down’?

With most of the world in ‘CovID-19’ lock-down, not many of us are out shooting at the moment. I have a lot of friends in the film and video industry and we all have the cleanest and tidiest Pelican cases ever. It seems that apart from news, all other video and film production has stopped. Everywhere!

So what can we do?

I have been involved in shooting a weekly church service which we do on a Thursday, ready for streaming on Sunday. (We are still allowed to gather in groups of up to 10 inside, while observing Social Distancing). We have a team of video professionals at our church who usually make their living in the industry. But we all have time on our hands.

Church on-line

This is an on-line streaming platform, set up by Life.Church in the US. It is free to use by any church, anywhere. Their web-based platform enables us to load an edited unlisted video to YouTube (using our own YouTube channel), and then stream it on a custom URL at times we decide. So for this church, we stream at the Sunday service times of 8.30am, 10.30am and 6pm. We edit three separate versions of the program that cater for each congregation.

Chat, Notes, Bible passages and more …

The Church on-line platform has heaps of options, including a chat window, a tab for notes and one for Bible passages. At time of posting, we have only had one Sunday where we couldn’t meet in person, but the chat window really helps us to know who we’re ‘sitting’ next to.

Podcast now a Videocast as well

We have been developing Podcasts for a number of years and have decided to turn one of them in a videocast. This was a three-hander, which three of our church staff answering the ‘Big Three’ questions from the previous Sunday. Now we shoot this as a three-camera shoot and stream this via the Church online platform.

The technical side …

For churches in our area (Sydney south) we have more video gear than most. For the past four years we have been producing 26 x 30 minute programs for the Australian Christian Channel. We use the Blackmagic ATEM switcher, three Canon XA35 cameras, talkback systems etc. We also have good lighting and audio systems which have all fed into producing a quality program.

We shifted all the gear into the FOH audio/lighting/video box at the rear of the church which is now a television studio. Each of us who work in the industry have added out own bits of equipment and we’re now very well equipped.

We have always talked about streaming and doing a whole lot more on-line … now that we have been sort of ‘forced’ into doing it we hope to keep it going when the world returns to normal. Let’s hope that’s sooner rather than later.

What are you doing during lockdown?