Calvary Church Communications Blog

Creative Week - Day Five

Saturday is our off day for the Communications Department.

Some of the creative team works on Saturday (obviously, since we have a Saturday night service), but we take it as our Sabbath day.  Rest, recreation and renewal are all essential to the creative process.

Creative Week - Day Four

Friday is the fourth day in our creative week.

Fridays are usually filled with post production work.  We try to get most of our videos edited and ready for the upcoming work week and for the next creative week.  Friday is also a time to work on any revisions requested by the Design Team for the next week (it's too late to work on revisions for this week because those videos are in the can, distributed, tested, and sitting at each campus already).

We also use Friday to tie up any loose ends or to handle anything that has come up for the weekend as a result of Thursdays rehearsals and asset distribution.  Much of the creative team takes off (all of the Worship Leaders take Friday off), but it's a "busy work" day for the Communications team.

Creative Week - Day Three

Thursday is the third day of our creative week.

On Thursday, the communications and media team has a brainstorm session and storyboards upcoming videos and print projects.  Thursday is also the day that we prepare all assets (videos, message support PowerPoint, banners, Bulletins, etc) for the weekend and get them distributed.  Thursday is a "land the plane" day as all of our creative work is coming to a close for that week's service.  It's also a get it done day for the next week's service.  Sometimes we have a video shoot Thursday evenings. 

The worship and drama teams all have rehearsals on Thursdays.  I can't tell you much about those because I don't attend.

Creative Week - Day Two

Wednesday is the second day of our creative week.

On Wednesdays we have our Design Team Meeting, which is a meeting of the creative team (Worship Leaders, Drama Director, Communications Director, Video Productions Director, and Tech Director) as well as representatives from the Teaching Team.  We have a nuts and bolt meeting to make sure we're all on the same page for the upcoming week(s).  We walk through service orders and try to visualize each element and transition as it will happen on stage.  Whereas with our creative meetings, we were working on creating elements, in our Design Team meeting we're focusing on designing the service as a whole.

Other things we do on Wednesdays include video shoots, post production, equipment maintenance, etc.

Creative Week - Day One

Our creative week starts on Tuesday. 

Service Review
We begin the day with our Service Review Meeting where we review the last week's service.
We look for possible on-going issues that need to be resolved and review each element at each campus to see if it accomplished the intended purpose of that element as it relates to the service as a whole.  This is a time to review what didn't work well, and what worked very well.

It's been said, "don't expect what you don't inspect."  Tuesday morning is our time of inspection.  Our service review team consists of: Communications Director, Campus Worship Leaders, Drama Director, and Tech Director.

Note: In doing a review meeting, it's easy to get bogged down in tech details.  In fact, that's the approach we took when we started our service review meetings.  I think our new approach is much better...we look at the purposes for elements and review how they worked in view of their purpose.  We still discuss ongoing tech issues, but we don't get bogged down.

Creative Meeting
Once we complete the review process (we try to keep it under an hour), we move into a Creative Meeting.  This meeting is a continuation of our Creative Get-away Meeting.  The Get-away Meeting is a time where we take several hours (sometimes a whole day) and go to an inspirational location (a park, lake house, etc) and plan for an upcoming series.  Our teaching team gives us an overview of the upcoming series (in as much detail as possible) and we just get away and brainstorm the elements for the series.  Then at our Tuesday morning Creative meetings, we review, check statuses, refine, and continue with discussions on any of the brainstorms that we came up with.  It's sort of like putting muscle on the bones that we came up with at our get-away meeting.

For our Creative Meetings, our goal is to be working on the service a week and a half out (in other words, we're usually not working on the creative production for the Sunday that is 5 days away, but rather the Sunday that is 12 days away).

Staff Meeting
We have our church staff meeting on Tuesdays at 11:00 am.  This is a time of devotion, prayer, and big picture catch up for the entire staff.

Production
Tuesday afternoons are a nose-to-the grindstone day where we get as much production done as possible.  It's a big day for print production (our Bulletin is designed on Tuesday), web updates, ezine design, etc.  I also spend some time working on preparation for Wednesday's Design Team meeting.

Creative Week - Intro

I've watched a series of interesting blog postings on Pace Hartfield's blog on Fellowship Church's creative week...what they do in a week to prepare for a service.  Inspired by Pace, I thought I'd share our creative process in a series of upcoming posts.

Pace's posts were by video, but I'm sticking to text for this one!  Be sure to tune in for the next couple of posts.

To kick it off, I'll paraphrase a quote from Pace in one of his videos...

The goal is to be prepared for the moment, so you can be completely immersed in the moment.  You want to be prepared so you always have one hand free and so that you're not operating at full capacity.  Try to never work at total capacity so you can be free to do what you need to do at that key moment.

Update: Our Set up

Chuck recently posted about our computing setup here in the Communications Ministry. Here's some updates including links and more technical info about what we're using. I'm taking his previous post and updating it:

We have 6 computers in an office suite separated from our main office area. They all run Windows XP Pro unless otherwise stated. They are set up as follows:

Station 1 - Video Editing Suite

Dell Precision 690 (1x Xeon 5130 2.0GHz Dual-Core , 2GB RAM, NVIDIA QuadroFX 3450, 146GB 15k-rpm boot disk, Firewire)
Adobe Production Premium CS3
2 Dell 20" Wide Screen Displays
2 KRK Rokit 5 Nearfield Monitors (w/ Auralex pads)
JVC MiniDV Tape Deck
1 standard VCR, 2 standard DVD players
Contour Designs Shuttle Pro
Adaptec U320 SCSI card
Calvary's standard Software Suite
Nero 7 Ultra Edition
HP StorageWorks LTO-3 Tape Drive (this backs up our multi-terabyte storage on the server)

Station 1 is our primary capturing/clip ingest station. However, we're currently putting together a little patching system to allow either editing suite to ingest/capture clips from tape/dvd/vcr.

Station 2 - Video Editing Suite

Dell Precision 650 (PDF) (2x P4-based Xeon 2.80GHz, 2GB RAM, Matrox Parhelia 128MB, 2x 146GB 15k-rpm disks, Firewire)
Adobe Production Premium CS3
1 Dell 20" Display
Generic Speakers
1 Contour Designs Shuttle Xpress
Calvary's standard Software Suite
Nero 7 Ultra Edition
Epson Perfection 3590 Scanner

DVD Production:

Rimage DVD Duplicator connected to a Dell Optiplex GX270 (PDF) computer. The system is networked, and all production/duplication tasks can be done from any computer on our network (with the proper Rimage software installed).

Station 3 (Communications Director) - Graphics/Video Editing

Dell Optiplex GX620 (Pentium D 2.80GHz, 2GB RAM, Radeon X300, 120GB boot disk, RAID-1 backup array)
Adobe Master Collection
1 Dell 20" Wide Screen Display
Wacom Cintiq LCD Tablet as Second Display
Calvary's standard Software Suite
Nero 7 Ultra Edition

Chuck uses this computer for a little bit of everything (web design, FLASH development, Photoshop/Illustrator design work, InDesign print work, video production when necessary, etc)

Station 4 (Communications Director) - Laptop

IBM T43 Laptop (Centrino 1.86GHz, 2GB RAM, Radeon X300, 60GB disk)
KVM to enable use with the Desktop computer (Station 3)
Calvary's standard Software Suite
Nero 7 Ultra Edition

Station 5 (Communications Associate) - Graphic Design

Dell Optiplex GX620 (Pentium D 2.80GHz, 2GB RAM, Radeon X300, 120GB boot disk)
Adobe Master Collection
1 Wacom Cintiq 21" Graphics Tablet Display
22" CRT Display
Epson Perfection 3590 Scanner
Calvary's standard Software Suite
Nero 7 Ultra Edition

We primarily use the Adobe Creative Suite (CS3) to do all of our Communications work.  We prefer to edit video on Premiere Pro CS3 over Avid and Final Cut because of how nicely it integrates into our work flow with our other Adobe products (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver, After Effects, etc.).  We do have a copy of Avid Express DV on hand in case we ever need it, but we rarely use it.  Some freelance vendors we work with use Final Cut on their Mac workstations and we just have them give us a DV-stream or mpg to bring into our workflow.

Communications Server (located elsewhere)

HP NAS 4000s (runs Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Storage Server)
PC-Pitstop x8 DAS RAID unit (connected to the NAS 4000s)

The communications server is primarily a fileserver for the large

Station 6 - IT Specialist

IBM T43 Laptop (Centrino 1.86GHz, 2GB RAM, Radeon X300, 60GB boot disk, 100GB ultrabay disk)
DVD Burner
VMWare Workstation
Treesize Professional
Acronis True Image Workstation
GetDataBack for NTFS
WinSCP
Putty
Calvary's standard Software Suite
Nero 7 Ultra Edition
7-Zip
Multiple Network Management tools, utilities
Multiple pieces of OSS
Acer 22" widescreen display
Winsplit Revolution
KVM for connection of other computers, servers, etc. for work and maintenance

I (Shawn) spend a good amount of my time doing Network admin tasks (mostly web or remote admin based), handling helpdesk requests, and helping the staff get good processes put in place for ACS (our "Church Management" software).

Calvary Church Communications Bundle

I've compiled a bundle of the various forms, checklists, worksheets we use around here and you can download it free from our Online Resource Center.

Admittedly, we (the Calvary Communications Ministry and Worship Arts Ministry) borrowed most of the content on a lot of these documents.  Freely we've received, freely we give away.

Some things that it includes are:

• Communications Manual
• Event Promotion Request Form
• A Sample of Our Teaching Schedule/Service Planning Document
• A Sample of Our Tech Packets
  • Services At A Glance Document
  • Cue Sheets
  • I/O Document
  • and More!
• A Sample of Our Bulletin
• A Sample of Our Message Support PowerPoint (downstream keyable version and full screen version)

I plan on adding these items to it soon:

• Communications Vision & Goals Document
• Communications Volunteer Assimilation Process Document

One Video

We've been busy here in the Communications Office lately.  We rearranged our entire office in hopes of making us more productive.  We've been cranking out publications (Youth Auction Program, Newspaper Ads, etc), producing videos, and prepping to support all of the summer activities here at Calvary.

Here is a short video that we produced to promote our upcoming series in Galatians that we're calling "One."  It turned out good and was really fun because it was a collaborative effort by most of us in the Communications office, as well as with a couple of other staff members.  Thanks to Aaron Latina for the (subtle) background track.