"And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days." -- Joel 2:27-29, The Bible
I've been running visuals for the Late Service at St. Aldate's. In an "ordinary" service this would mean getting the words of songs on screen at the right time, and keeping the speaker on-camera - straightforward stuff and all things I've done so often, they've become reflex. (Watch me during a service I'm not on AV, if you don't believe that...) The Late Service has gone beyond that, using video backgrounds behind the song words to aid the worship.
"Uh-huh, what's so special about that?" you may (or may not) ask. There is the ever-present danger of doing it for the sake of doing it, for the technical challenge, or even to "liven up" the worship - to which you might well reply "So what?". Background visuals can be just a "nice touch" but I always strive for more than that; to become as much a part of the worship as each instrument in the band, as each heart of the congregation. What I do behind the sound desk is my worship to God, my offering laid out on the screens that everyone can see. (That, by the way, is why it upsets me when I have to put up things that I know are low-quality. I want to give God more than that.)
Tonight, as Owen was playing and singing "For greater things have yet to come, and greater things are still to be done in this city" I felt God say, "Look outside. Outside the doors." Outside? How could I do that? The collection of loops we have is limited and there wasn't what I wanted to show. I went for the only "outside shot" I had available to me: across the entrance foyer and out through the front doors. And someone promptly walked across the shot and out of the building.
It struck me (as I walked to hand in work to the comlab at 1.15am) that what I was doing was learning a new language. As with any language, when you start you have a limited vocabulary - and when you want to express a specific thing, you can be scrabbling for words, hoping vaguely to get your point across. Here, the language was pictures, the point was God's heart, and my attempts to communicate were in desperation the closest thing I could get to the picture in my head. But that's OK - any language takes time to learn. And I know the point was gotten across (thanks Emily).
I really want to develop this further - I want to take a camcorder out and just walk around Oxford for a day, for one. The more words you have in your vocab list, and the more you learn them, the more expressive you'll be in the language. And the more new words you add, the less likely you are to fall back to the very basics - "Bonjour, je m'appelle James, j'ai vingt ans, j'habite a Oxford..." has a certain equivalence with those time-lapse clouds. They have a place, but there's so much more to French (right, Jenny?)
Oh, go on then.
And as for my vocab list? It'd be really useful if the thumbnail menu we have actually linked in with VLC to select what video was playing. And seamless looping in VLC would be nice, too... The former, at least, I've already prototyped.
2 comments:
Ah, you sum up many of my thoughts so well. I realised I had unwittingly used a very bad visual pun last night when I put up the cross and rain picture for a song about God reigning. I'm sure there should be a plugin for VLC to allow a thumbnail view - afterall iTunes can do it... :p
Ah, but just you try getting iTunes to work properly with dual screens! Or Front Row (is that what it's called?) for that matter.
As Jamie said to me on Saturday: VLC isn't the best answer, but it was the first and easiest answer at the time.
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