for years i’ve been blown away by creative and engaging video staging setups. if you are new to the idea of “video staging”, think of it simply as adding screens (or any type of video display) to a stage/platform, going beyond the typical setup of one/two screens for displaying lyrics and iMAG/backgrounds. you can get extremely creative with video staging; it serves as a great backdrop as well as a great way to bring the visual element more into the experience that the worship team is facilitating.

i recently got to work with the amazing teams at LifeWay & Technical Innovation on Beth Moore’s Living Proof Live conference in San Antonio. usually on an “end stage” setup, we have a large center screen framed by trussing. this time, we decided to take it up a notch and produce a 3-screen setup.

we accomplished this by simply adding two extra projectors & screens, plus a nifty little device by Matrox called the TripleHead2Go. i simply used my MacBook Pro (running ProVideoPlayer)….set my resolution to 3072 x 768 … and outputted to the TripleHead2Go … which split out directly to the 3 projectors. some content i custom created for this resolution…but most of my loops were either set at 800×600 or 1280×720 …so i had to live with a widened image… but honestly it still looked great to a sea of 10,000 women!

for another great blog entry on the TripleHead2Go, click here!

have you ever used a TripleHead2Go or done any kind of video staging?

Tags: Creativity, Hardware, video staging // 6 Comments »

BTW… the term is not derogatory  Dave Cooke, chief video engineer and friend of ours at Renewed Vision, has a site worth visiting, www.monsterchurch.com.  There you can learn more about why Willow is appropriately named a monster church by their tech crew that has the monster task of keeping up with everything there.

One thing I think they do really well and better than most is staging with soft goods.  I know, this is the worship VJ blog, and we’re supposed to focus on all things video.  Well, I wanted one of my first posts here to help clear the air–video is not the end all be all.  My home church had all video sets for a year, then basically hung up the VJ shoes for 6 months to make sure they were not wearing out a good thing.

We were up at the Arts Conference last month, and their set did a great job of adding depth and using lighting and soft goods.  They have a challenge there just due to the sheer size of their stage.  We have helped with some sets at North Point that the guys at Willow would need to triple just to make it look larger than a postage stamp on their stage.

Here are a few images–please excuse my camera phone quality.

How are you using soft goods to enhance your environments?

Tags: General // 1 Comment »

Over the years we have done a lot of work with Willow Creek.  The team up there have become good friends, and their work is second to none.  They more or less started the mega-church movement, and continue to innovate more than 20 years later.  

The set last week for their Leadership Summit was incredible.  Chis Thomas, weekend lighting director sent me a few pics.  

Here are the specs:

PVP Master Station
Mac Pro Tower, Dual-Core 2.66 GHz

PVP Node
Mac Mini Intel Core 2 Duo 1.83 GHz

Video Output
203 Element Labs HD Versa Tubes
2 Element Labs D2 Processors

Lighting Rig Specs
16 – VL3000 Spot (10 ours, 11 rental)
6 – VL3500 Wash (demo from VL)
8 – High End Systems X-spot (ours)
21 – Mac 2K Washes (ours)
18 – SGM Giotto Wash (ours)
12 – Robe I36 LED Wash (ours)
18 – Color Kinetics ColorBlaze LED striplights (rental)

This set is a great example of where video seems to be going–especially for live concerts.  For awhile now we have seen more and more low-rez video elements, allowing video (usually LED) to be used just as much as a vibe setting lighting element as actual pixel specific video.

How are you using low-rez elements in your services?

Tags: General // Add Comment »

the use of “motion lyrics” seems to be gaining popularity. you might have seen these at a Steve Fee concert, the Chris Tomlin tour, or at a Passion conference. Even Integrity Music has overhauled their iWorship videos and are producing them as flexible motion lyric video files.

one of my friends, Brandon Horner, has started creating his own custom motion lyrics for his church in NW Arkansas. Check out his YouTube page where he is posting them. he used Apple’s Motion and Adobe After Effects…and i’m glad to say that he’ll be teaching me some of this next week. Here’s what he created for “God of This City”.

have you seen motion lyrics in use at all? are you creating any for your band/church/etc?

~ proctor

Tags: Custom Content, Motion Lyrics // 2 Comments »

starting a blog is harder than i thought. i have so much to say…so many things i’m excited to blog about…and i have no idea where to begin.

i found myself in this situation in school when writing term papers and essays…starting is the hardest thing to do. so i thought i’d just start by talking about this very fact.

i can feel the pressure lifting already…

so welcome to the worshipVJ blog! after months and months of grueling work and designing and redesigning…we’re finally ready to launch!

You might find a few more postings on here by the time you read this…we (greg dolezal & i) wanted to have a few things for everyone to read by the time we went live.

our heart for this blog is to create a community for the VJs out there…the visual worship leaders…the creative worshipers…whether you are involved in a church or not, designing and running video, lighting or any type of visual media…even if you are a lead worshiper wanting to dive into the world of visual worship….we hope to host this community by sharing our own visual experiences on the road and hearing about yours.

do any of you have your own blog? if so, tell us about it…and if not, what would your blog be about if you did have one?

Stay classy San Diego…and thanks for stopping by (but mostly, stay classy!)

~ proctor

Tags: General // 4 Comments »