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VBS 2024: Reflecting from a Production & Creative viewpoint

Many churches have a VBS, or Vacation Bible School, during the summer to teach children about God through fun activities, worship, and lessons. I know many places call it different things besides VBS, too. At North Way, we call ours KidsGiG (which stands for Growing in God).

In my role, I oversee everything creative and production for our kids and student ministries at North Way’s Wexford campus. This summer was my first KidsGiG at North Way, which was very exciting. This year, 642 kids attended KidsGiG at the Wexford campus. Let’s dive into some of my experiences and takeaways from the week from a production/creative point of view!

Praise by Elevation Worship during Elementary Large Group Session

We use Orange’s 252 Kids curriculum for our weekly kids experiences and use their VBS curriculum for KidsGiG. From a production and creative standpoint, I have to say I’m not the biggest fan of Orange and the resources they provide. They often make what I call “interesting” design choices. That led me to create our own slide and logo package for Start The Party since that is the June/July weekend kids curriculum theme in addition to the VBS theme. I found a template on StoryLoop that matched some of the decor our kids team was already working on and customized it for Start The Party.

One thing I really wanted to try for KidsGiG this year was creating content for our video wall using Unreal Engine. In May, I used Unreal Engine for the first time at a Student Ministry all-campus worship night. It was overall successful, but I found out that even for our best Mac Studio, real-time rendering would not work. I pivoted to some pre-rendered backgrounds that we used as virtual sets. After rendering many thousands of frames, we had a main DJ hosting set, a “Cafe Disco” set for a dance portion of the large group sessions, and a few different Bible Teaching backgrounds, some specific to the lesson for the day. I’m excited to see how I can continue to use this in the future for events like KidsGiG and possibly for some virtual sets for filming.

Hosting Set rendering in Unreal Engine
Testing the Cafe Disco set on the LED wall the week before

During the week, we had two different power outages. The first one was from Monday afternoon until 6:30 AM Tuesday (it came back on just as we were deciding if we should cancel that day or not – God really does have perfect timing!!). The second was Wednesday evening from around 3-6:30 PM. The first one was the roughest for me and my team because there were some small things (probably things only the production team noticed) that I wanted to troubleshoot after the first day but didn’t have the time to do with the power being out. Both outages put us a little behind schedule with what we wanted to be able to do. We were still able to get slides finalized and lights programmed (even if they were a little less polished than I planned, I was probably the only one to notice). Looking back, the power outages were more of a delay than a hindrance. In that delay, there was some unexpected rest, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. The building also had this weird “half power” thing where most of the kids’ space still had power, which meant I had unexpected time throughout the week to prepare for weekend kids’ services because I couldn’t do anything else.

One challenge was having two simultaneous large group sessions happening. Our main sanctuary had the elementary opening session, and our South Venue had the preschool opening session. I wanted to be able to communicate with both and understand what was happening at both. Elementary was the more technically demanding and elaborate, so I set up a “command center” in our production suite overlooking the main sanctuary. I also gave myself a wide shot of the South Venue stage, a multiview for the sanctuary sources, and a TV. The TV had remote access to graphics computers for both spaces, Playback remote control for the sanctuary (I was also running tracks for worship), planning center service orders, and micboard monitoring mics for both spaces. The command center really helped manage both spaces without me running around.

My view from the Command Center

As part of the communications between spaces, we used two separate comms systems. In the sanctuary, we used our ClearComm system. The problem was we didn’t have enough wireless comms packs to give people backstage or the South Venue those units. Instead, we used the ClearComm wireless units for camera operators and me in the sanctuary and used Hollyland comms units for backstage and the South Venue. This worked really well. Both were single ear headsets, so I was able to go “double headset” all week to hear everything I needed to.

I love creating experiences for people to encounter God, and there is something special about doing that in a VBS-style environment. And I got to do this week with an incredible group of people too. Thank you so much to everyone involved, from the platform to those behind cameras, screens, and consoles. You made this week so much better!

Leading up to KidsGiG, I had been praying that God would take the lead in the planning, the elements, the design, everything. And He did! He is the reason for every good thing that came out of that week. He gets all the glory for everything from KidsGiG 2024. 40 kids accepting Christ at KidsGiG made everything worth it. Looking forward, I have many ideas and things I want to work on improving for next year. I started integrating some KidsGiG processes and elements into our regular weekend services.

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