Church on the Move (Tulsa, OK) has a reputation for experimenting with creative arts to tell the story of Christ. I like the simple execution but powerful imagery of the backdrop for their Easter weekend worship.
As worship leaders led the congregation in song, three painters began writing bright red-pixeled letters in the background.
It spelled “Amazing Grace.”
At this point, they began singing the song Amazing Grace, and the red letters became a crown of thorns as an image of Christ on the cross appeared behind the letters.
To see the complete opening performance, watch this video:
For Discussion:
- Did your church do something creative for Easter? Share the video link or tell the story in the comments.
Our Pastor did an illustrated message titled Who Are You Looking For? similar type of message as this opening - http://vimeo.com/10733100
Wow.. VERY cool! I’d love to know how they did this… Is it an LED screen? How did they “paint” the letters on? Great stuff.
Thanks for posting this. What a simple yet powerful way to convey the deep meaning of what happened at Calvary.
Hey Cameron, my name is Whit and I’m the arts director at Church on the Move. Thanks for your interest (and thanks to Kent for posting this) and here’s how we did it. Yes, it is a LED screen. LED was essential because when LED is black the actual LED’s are off, so it’s truly black. No light whatsoever is coming from the wall. If you tried this with a projector, I don’t think it would work as well because when a projector shows black it’s still passing light so letters wouldn’t have looked as painted as they would on LED. Make sense?
Secondly, the whole thing had to start with the illustrator. The image of Christ isn’t a photograph, it’s an illustration. We chose to have it illustrated because we felt we would have more control with an illustrator vs. trying to find the right “jesus” actor. With an actor comes the trouble of hair makeup and blood and so forth so to us it just made a lot more sense to us have it illustrated. The guy who did the illustration is Tim Jessell. His website is http://www.timjessell.com. He’s an incredible illustrator who we had worked with on another project so we knew he would knock this one out of the park. The other part of choosing an illustrator is that we wanted the letters to feel like part of art, not just an afterthought, and having someone compose the whole thing from that point of view really was an asset in the success of the whole thing.
After the illustration was done (it was done in five layers 1) the background 2) the cross 3) The body of Christ 4) The head of Christ 5) The letters “amazing grace”) we took just the letters and began to work with animating them in strokes, in addition we created tiny guides that were invisible to the crowd but visible to the painters. This tiny guide went ahead of the animated paint so that the painters could have something to follow. Creating these guides was the biggest challenge to the whole thing.
The final step was practice with painters. They probably rehearsed this 25-30 times and that made the biggest difference.
Sorry for the novel! But there’s no easy way to explain how that piece worked. Hope that helped.
I really liked the beginning, the words into the crown of thorns was awesome.
-Hey Whit, great job to you and your team on this video/drama/worship experience! I loved the LED painting. Sounds like it took a lot of time to figure out, but well worth it.
-Here is the video we did at Christ Community Church for Easter. It is an interactive piece that drove home the message topic of the day - Christ’s Supremacy.
http://vimeo.com/11146089
Hey Lucas thanks for sharing that video. Very cool idea. How did people respond to it?
Whit, thanks! People followed along and did what the video asked, but they responded differently than I thought. They laughed at most of questions. But at the end they really got the point and cheered at the “WE SIT BECAUSE THERE IS ONLY ONE WHO STANDS” part. We then kicked into “Jesus The One and Only” song.
All in all it worked out well.
Hey Whit, I was amazed with the quality of your video content, meaning the quality of your stream is there any way u can gimme a break down of how cotm achieves this high quality. I’ve seen many streams but have yet to se one as clear as cotm. I know u guys use vimeo but i would like to know what encoders, format, and hardware, switching etc.
In 2009 we did Pirates of the Galilean: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZrj6AG3OD8
This year we told the story of Jesus in Robin of the Hood, with music from Michael Jackson. Kind of a Robin Hood set in the Hood. No youtube link yet.
@Joshua Dude, sorry it’s taken me so long to respond but I haven’t looked back at these comments until recently. Honestly, I’m not super clear on all the work that goes into getting our services to look like they do online. If you want to send me an email at whitney@wgm.us I’d be happy to put you touch with the guys who head that up.
super cool, very nice presentation. who wouldn’t be moved by seeing that.