I don't have to tell anyone reading this that 2020 was a bit of a weird year, to say the least. As we approached Christmas, it became clear that we wouldn't be able to have a traditional Christmas service at our facilities as we normally do. In mid-november, the Pastoral staff came to me with the idea to pre-record the full service, and I said "Great idea, we have to start right now to make it happen!" So, we did just that.
There were several sequences to film, and a lot of coordinating to do. First, we filmed all of the teaching segments in the homes of the teachers. Since the theme was "Christmas at Home" it seemed only fitting to be in the homes of those teaching as well. We filmed those over the course of a few days in early December.
The larger and more daunting sequences to film were the live music portions. First, I had to borrow a few more cameras from a local church. Second, I had to assemble a crew to work the cameras, which wound up being about 5 of us. We gathered all the people and equipment, and assigned each camera person to a zone, either on stage or in front of it, to make sure we had coverage for the full song. As the band would rehearse the song, we would plan and practice how we would shoot the sequence. A cool touch that we made was to record a "live score" for each of the teaching segments that would flow into the songs that were played after each sequence. It made the whole edit feel very cohesive.
We wound up doing about two full takes of each song sequence to use for the multitrack recording, and for multiple camera angles that would work. Since we recorded the song the same exact way each time, I essentially had 10 camera angles to work with in post-production for any given part of the song, which was handy.
All-in-all, it was an extremely ambitious project, and I doubt I will have quite as unique a moment in time to capture as that Christmas.
