Screens

An exercise in focus

It’s another Sunday morning, and a “special” one at that. I am having more of those as time goes on. I am one of those strange “church people”, for reasons I don’t fully understand myself, but I think it serves a purpose, and I do what I can.

What makes these particular Sunday mornings “special” for me is that they are my weeks to run “screens” for the classic (i.e. mostly old people like me) service. On the surface it is pretty simple, for someone simply attending the service.

The screens are a modern addition for a classic service, but a practical one. There are two main projection screens up front, two supplemental ones for the balcony, and two stage display monitors facing forward at the back of the main floor. Behind the scenes it’s another story, involving a bunch of people. They are used to display hymn lyrics, artwork, the text for congregational readings, slides that accompany the sermons, videos, and more. They are quite helpful for this aging congregation.

For me, running these things begins the previous Thursday when I go to choir practice as usual, but during the rehearsal for Sunday I practice running the slides instead of singing. When I find mistakes in the slides — which is often — I correct on the fly if possible, or I stay afterward to do it if there is time. When we move on to working on future anthems, I move on up front and join my section. Sometimes I end up trekking back and forth.

If all goes well, I also receive the sermon notes on Thursday. I make two passes through them at home, one on Friday, to familiarize myself with them, and another on Saturday, to mark them up, identifying keywords that I can use to keep track of where we are at a given moment, and to identify anything special about the slide changes.

On Sunday morning there is a routine that can end up having many exceptions. The basic plan, for me, is:

• Get up super-early, have breakfast, and feed the cats

• Arrive very early, but not too early or the doors will be locked

• Turn on all the video equipment and make sure it works; this also involves climbing the stairs into the balcony to turn on one old projector that can no longer “see” the remote from the main floor

• Reconcile my annotated sermon notes with the actual sermon slides (which I haven’t seen in advance)

• Run slides for the service run-through

• Run slides for the choir warm-up and mini-rehearsal

• Make last-minute slide corrections

• Start the 5-minute countdown timer video at the right time

• Hopefully the choir is seated by the time the countdown reaches 2 minutes; otherwise mutter about it to the sound crew

• And off we go; the prelude begins, we hope, when the timer reaches zero and fades to black, and I show the prelude title slide

• What follows, in my mind, is something like being a dog in a dog sled team. Everybody’s pulling together, and I don’t ever want to fall behind! It is something else, and it goes for over an hour.

I won’t detail the different segments of the service here, but they are at least somewhat consistent from week to week. Slide timing is critical at every stage, to avoid creating distractions, and I have to keep my head clear at all times, which is not at all simple for me. Some segments are somewhat unpredictable, and I have to respond to the unexpected in fractions of a second.

At the end, with the end-of-service slide up, I shut everything down (climbing the stairs to the balcony again) and head for my class in the adjacent building. Whew!

I do sometimes wonder why anyone would volunteer for a job like this, with zero pay. But people do.

I had some other thoughts along the theme of “screens” and “screenings”, but it is time to get dressed, feed the cats and go! See you later!