Worship Media Arts

“In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.”

- Alfred Hitchcock

Much of what exists in worship media today takes its cue from the feature film tradition: a compelling story is conceived, penned by script and/or storyboard, shot to match and edited. The term “mini-movie” has even become a sort of conventional wisdom for describing any kind of narrative video designed for worship.

They are popular because these sorts of short films, to some degree, are portable. They don’t contain characters, scenes, and references which bind them to a particular time or space. They can be produced for a local congregation and later sold/shared/given to other congregations to use. Mini-movies are often fashioned as short parables. Many make extensive use of parody and comedy to communicate clear messages about faith, doctrine, and principles for Christian living.

In spite of the increasingly high production values many of these “mini-movies” employ, I find myself unmoved by many of them. Today I realized why.

While not trying to denigrate the power of a good “minimovie”, I think there is another model for worship media that, while currently under-utilized, has great power to communicate the gospel. That is the model of documentary film. Whereas feature films are manufactured, in the sense that a story is conceived and then given motion, documentary films are actualized. In other words, documentary films capture events that actually happen.

Notice that I said actual, not real. In a sense, every film is a lie, whether dealing with actual events or not. As documentary filmmaker Wolf Koenig said, “Every cut is a lie… Those two shots were never next to each other in time that way. But you’re telling a lie in order to tell the truth.”

I even hesitate to use the distinctions of “fiction” and “non-fiction”. This is because pre-conceived films have great power to communicate truth, and even if framed within a fictional setting can still be very real. The catch for this type of film and video for worship is that it is dependent on professional production values – values that, given the demands of ongoing weekly worship, exceed the technical and creative prowess of most producers working in churches today.¬?So, I am not making an argument that film and video in a documentary style is exclusively able to capture truth. Any visual story, whether pre-conceived or captured in the moment, can be a compelling story of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Instead, I am wondering whether documentary-style films may be a superior format for weekly worship.

Documentary-style film and video for worship draws from the actual events that happen daily in the lives of the people from within that congregation. As God moves in individual lives, these people develop personal life stories that become a compelling narrative of transformation. Stories of God’s movement exist everywhere – as the saying goes, every person has a story. There is a world of material at the artist’s disposal in every local church.

Documentary-style media also gives the artist / producer a more manageable model for creating media on a weekly basis than a feature film model. While it is inconceivable for me as a video professional to develop, shoot and post a scripted video on a weekly basis, it is quite reasonable to use a “in the moment” approach to capture a story and frame it in such a way that it effectively communicates the gospel.

This is the kind of video clip on which I cut my teeth. When I first started as a full time media minister, I spent a lot of time out in the field–interviewing church attendees, capturing service in action, even creating “on-the-street” videos to present the pulse of the culture to the congregation in worship. I would take raw footage and manipulate them into 90 second to 3 minute long snippets for worship: a testimony of a saved marriage or freedom from addiction, a celebration of a Habitat for Humanity house being built, a sequence of sound bites describing a cultural understanding of the word “grace”.

When my fellow Midnight Oil Guy Jason, a true artist (as in, the guy went to art school and everything), joined our church staff, we began to experiment with pre-conceived video. We began to pre-script shots and sequences, and even on occasion used storyboards to plan what was going to happen. While on one hand I loved the new styles we employed, on the other hand I struggled a bit – I thought of Jason as the real artist, and myself as “just” a video producer / shooter / editor. It took some time before I realized that the styles of video I had created from the beginning were art, too. All art is exploration. The act of being an artist is to both discover and reveal. To effective tell a gospel story is to illuminate, to move, and to call the viewer to know Christ, whether the story is pre-conceived and manufactured or captured in the moment and framed.

And when I say “documentary video”, I don’t mean to imply that videos need to only have still slates with white type over a black background, as many “documentary films” do. That is a stylitic decision. Having enjoyed experiencing and co-developing motion graphic design with Jason for years, I much prefer something that is visually compelling, artistically created, and hopefully something that conveys a hook or metaphor by which the viewer can understand the story better.

So I am going to create a series of how-to blog posts in this space on the art of editing a documentary-style video for worship, in an effort to encourage artists, producers and media folks to capture events that are actually happening around their local churches, and use them as a way to powerfully tell the story of Jesus Christ.

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