This Christmas Eve, Salem Lutheran Church here in Texas (with an Echo Hub reader or two on staff) tried something pretty interesting. Joel Wetzstein, SLC’s Director of Worship & Integrated Communications, told me the team set out to do two things:
- Leverage the church’s new organizational structure, which combined Worship, Communication, IT, and Production Technologies into one department.
- Put Salem Lutheran School’s 54 iPads to good use during Christmas.
That’s where the idea for an iPad-driven video wall came in. While doing some research, the team discovered Sofftech A.S., a company in Istanbul that had coordinated large iPad video walls in the past. Joel and the team worked with Sofftech’s Çagdas Timurlenk on the software development, and also went to work coordinating the music, video, and choreography elements of what they had in mind. Here’s Joel:
Our theme for the Christmas Eve service was “Contagious Christmas” based off of Luke 2:17. It says that “the shepherds returned, glorifying God and telling everyone what they had heard and seen …”
Today we use technology to share and see everything we do. We “Share/Like/ +1” everything, and our goal was to tell the “Contagious Christmas” story and create a contagious environment for the people in attendance that night from the very first cue of the service.
The service started with a blackout, silence … and then a single voice singing “Silent Night.” As the song continued, 54 people, each holding an iPad stood up singing until the whole church had “contagiously” joined in singing. We filled the darkness of the worship center with a starry night video playing on each individual iPad, (as well as countless iPhones under the control of our Jands Vista Lighting board and iLEDMapper, an app that we had modified by a developer in France.)
The 54 iPad holders ended up on stage and consolidated their iPads down to 18 people each holding 3 iPads in our custom designed and built 3-way iPad holders.
It was a massive undertaking — from recruiting, choreography, building custom holders, figuring out how to edit for an ever-changing video matrix, light programming, music rehearsals, etc. A conservative estimate for this single element, the first 8 minutes of our worship service, shows that we put in over 700-man hours to make it happen. It was stunning display of technology, movement, video, lighting, and music — all presented to enhance the telling of the Christmas story that followed.
And now that you have all the background, here’s the final result:
(Note: Watch the video on YouTube and check the description to see the production’s full credits.)
Pretty cool, huh? It just goes to shows you what’s possible when you get creative when the resources you’ve been given. Hopefully, Salem Lutheran Church’s willingness to experiment gives you a few ideas to try in your local church context, even if you don’t have access to 54 iPads.
