Book Commercials & Misanthropic Observations

Ok, I do not blog about work, so I am treading lightly here.

I am starting to cringe when I hear any phrase close to this “You know what would be really cool? (Insert nebulous video project here)”

What I mean by nebulous is I get directions like. “Don’t make it cheesy” or “make it powerful” or “just throw together a few images”. Do you have any idea what that really means?

The fact is, whoever is saying this actually has something very specific in mind, and unless I can read their mind- which I CANNOT- I will work for hours, many more hours that they realize, show it to them, and having given it my all because I do not like to half ass anything, I am given more nebulous feedback to “fix” it. Meanwhile I have tons of other work that still needs to get done. But because the person who thinks this would be cool just thinks it entails ‘throwing together something’ and has no idea I spent 5 hours on this I end up looking a little unnecessarily cranky.

Now, to be fair, no on knows what it takes to do anyone’s job. I completely underestimate what a Pastor goes through. And no one wishes to be difficult, and I do not want ever to squash creativity for worship. So I’ve decided on some ground rules that should help us all.

If you want a video from scratch you must provide me with the images.
Saying it would be cool to play this song over images of “whatever” is not enough. First of all, you need variety. 3 minutes of pictures of anything gets a little boring. How do I know where you want to go with variety here? And when I go a completely different direction and you do not like it- well, we are both a little frustrated then.

You need no more than 2 seconds per image on average, or it gets tedious.(it’s all about congregational attention spans) For a 3minute 20 second song that’s 200 seconds. You need to collect a minimum of 100 various images and give them to me in the order you would like them. Also- they cannot be 300 pixel images you got off Google image search. They must be high quality. If you want video footage, you must also provide this yourself.

Now when this begins to seem like so much work, that may help you evaluate its importance. We may decide it is very significant and go ahead and do a great job. But now I won’t be working so long on something that wasn’t vital to the service.

Basically this is my fault. I have not really understood myself how crazy this can get. I should have laid the same ground rule I have for web design and PowerPoint work.

I do not make it - you do. I only make it prettier when you are done.

This rule seems to have been accepted without offense and helps us all to know what is expected.

PS Also trust me when I say that the cool effect you once saw at another church is going to take more time to figure out than 3 days. New effects can take months to master- not just creation, sometimes it means new equipment or software and then training the moppits to run it. For example: it took from Feb to Sept 2006 -8 months- to impliment Easy Worship- after reviewing software for over 2 years before that. AND we are still learning it’s quirks. So that’s almost 3 years to effectively move past just using PowerPoint.

Really I am not say “No”. I am saying “yes, we need to grow and have fresh content.” But please realize that it is not just a matter of “whipping something up”. It’s work. Rewarding-wonderful-thankyou-God-for-my-Job WORK.