THE IN-BETWEEN PLACE

"Part II"

Good Friday is a big deal at The Woodlands UMC. Back in the days where Chris Tomlin was their worship leader, they would hold services at the 16,000-seat Woodlands Pavilion. The year I started was the first year they moved the night back to campus and tried to recreate the same magic. For the first several years years they'd bring in big worship leaders and build massive stages outdoors, with mixed results. 

Eventually, we built an actual worship team to plan the event, and we decided to make the service less about a being a big event and more about being a distinct and focused night of worship. We'd build the service thematically around an idea, then produce the best possible service we could around that concept.

This year's theme was "The In-Between Place" - that is, the moment in between Christ's sacrifice and resurrection, the long pause before the dawn breaks clear on the horizon and you know the joy of Christ’s return. We wanted it to be poetic and haunting, and my boss just pointed at me and said "go write this."

Since I do not write poetry, this was a bit of a risk, but I loved getting the chance to play with this idea and try to create something, between the words and the filmed images, that conveyed what waiting for a Savior meant.

This is the finished film, with a recording of a rehearsal with the narrator (Emily Hudson) laid over the top. 

Now, here is the live performance of the piece. There were actually three pieces to this - a section read aloud outside, as the cross was brought in through the crowds to the sanctuary, this section midway through worship, and a wordless section that closed out the night.

I've worked with Emily in a dozen different projects, and I love doing so because she always brings her whole self into everything that she does. Everyone else in the project wanted to find someone loud and booming to do this part. I wanted Emily, and what she brought to this performance is why.

CHRISTMAS EVE AT THE LOFT

“UNEXPECTED”

A lot of church worship planning is announcing that we want to do something stunningly different from what we’ve ever done before, workshopping several new ideas for a couple of months, and then ending up doing pretty much what we’ve always done but maybe with some different lighting.

That’s not always a bad thing - planning a service dedicated to praising Jesus and doing something for shock value are goals that are going to end up at odds more often than not.

But this Christmas was different. We decided to do a modern retelling of the Mary and Joseph story as a short film, a half-hour movie intercut with live worship. And we did it on Christmas Eve.

I’ve never had any sort of reaction to a video like that before. Some people loved it and some people hated it, but people kept talking about it. My pastor’s boss demanded a copy to watch immediately in order to see if he should be fired or not, though he ended up liking the movie and commented “we should do more things like that.”

I had an amazing time, but getting this thing finished on schedule almost killed me and I’m glad this was a one-year experiment into how different you could make Christmas Eve without people completely freaking out.

The whole film is 36 minutes, there’s a scene highlighted below, and then the whole movie beneath that.

UNDER WRAPS

VIDEO BUMPERS

We produced a series of video bumpers for our Advent season in a series called Under Wraps, knowing we were later going to be producing a packaged version for other churches to use. I produced sermon bumpers for the series that operated like a series of short silent films - themed around a wordless longing for a gift that has yet to come.

We planned the details of this to connect seamlessly. At each service, the video would finish with a shot of the present hidden in each of the films, and then a single light would highlight the same present on the altar table in each sanctuary, before all the lights would come up and the pastor would begin their message on the theme expressed in the video.

We did five overall, with the last, "Joy," playing on Christmas Eve. Then we played that last one again the Sunday after Christmas, because it just made us so happy to see that little dog in a Santa outfit. Sometimes it's the little things.

THE HARVEST CHRISTMAS EVE

"Winter Snow"

For this Christmas Eve, we wanted an element that would make the evening feel different than other services - a feeling of surprise, of sudden wonder. Our pastor’s daughter, Gabbi Sorensen, was only a senior in high school at the time but was already an accomplished ballerina. She choreographed a dance that fit that feeling, and during rehearsal that day, I tried to choreograph camerawork that matched her delicate movements.

This is the live broadcast from the first of those services.

SOUNDTRACK

"Finding Peace In Suffering"

Mark Swayze decided that this Lenten series would be a study in walking through the Psalms as we built up towards Easter. Building off of the Lenten study Soundtrack by our friend JD Walt, we produced a weekly live video around a psalm from that week.

These were a joy to shoot (minus the tremendous heat that this many Edison bulbs puts out - we kept needing breaks to cool off in between takes), but this one is my favorite - Cameron Holmes' adaptation of Psalm 4.