VBS at EagleNaz
This last week, I participated in the VBS program held at our church. My oldest son attended and my wife was a group leader. I, of course, worked the technology. The program used Group's Paul and the Underground Church as its material. This program was well done and seemed to be a lot of fun. Our youth center was converted into a Roman market place where a variety of crafts and activities took place. A hallway and classroom were converted into a cave (which did spook some kids) where Christains would meet in hidding. And there were a number of Roman-era like games for activiies. The platform in the worship center was converted into the Coliseum.
Back to the technology: I had the opportunity to use SongShow Plus in ways that I usually don't use it. I use SongShow on a regular basis, but that use is typically limited to building slide shows and programs. I don'tr actually run SongShow in a service. This is because my status on Sundays is either: One the worship team; at home getting boys ready for church; or away. For this event, however, I built the slide shows, programs, and operated the computer. Its good to do that every once in a while. In the process, I jotted down several notes regarding some changes I'd like to see implemented.
This experience was also good because I got to use some features of SongShow that my church typically doesn't use. In particular, the audio track feature. This feature was introduce in the June 2007 Edition of SongShow Plus. We don't use it at our church because we use live music. For the VBS, however, we used the audio tracks provided to us as part of the VBS program materials. Being able to tie an audio track to song lyrics was very helpful in this case because I was the sole operator of music, lyrics, and sound. I also used the audio mixer controls in the control window to adjust the sound level from song to song -- also very helpful.
Another feature that I used was page-by-page mode display mode, again something we don't use with our song lyrics on a regular basis. In this situation, however, it seemed appropriate to split-up long verses and choruses. Since we were using the songs with audio tracks, the verse order never changed, so I entered this information in to the default verse order for each song in the Song Properties window. This way, I didn't need to re-enter the verse order each time we used a song.
The materials provided to us with for the VBS program included a number of graphics. I found one that worked as the VBS logo. It was an image file that I set to act as the Blank Slide. I found it helpful to insert a blank slide between every song and video we used in the program. This let me simply click the '+' button through out the event to moving us from one song to the next, with appropriate breaks (the logo) in between.
So, among the notes I jotted down, here are a few things that I noticed and plan to address. First, the capability to permanently assign an audio track to a song would be helpful. That is to say, when the song is added to a program, the audio track is also automatically assigned. This wish, actually, has already been submitted by another user. Now I better see its value. I also noticed some awkwardness regarding the use of the default verse order of songs. I won't go into detail except to say that some things related to the feature may change in the edition or so
Anyway, this pretty much sums up my use of SongShow Plus for songs. There was also some slide show work that I'll dicuss in an upcoming post.
Dave Foshee, our church's new children's pastor, posted some videos of the event:
- Paul and the Underground Church Day One
- Paul and the Underground Church Day Two
- Paul and the Underground Church Day Three
- Paul and the Underground Church Day Four
(BE212)