From Full Screen to Lower Thirds

Earlier in the month I was asked to help with part of the production of the God and Country show. It was a nearly last minute request to provide on-screen lyrics for the worship set of the event. I wasn't given much information except for the set list. Initially, I was told that I should build full screen slides with a background for the event. Due to the limited time I had, I put the songs into a program then set a single set of slide properties to be used for all songs in the program.

Upon arriving at the production booth the day of the event, I say that the production team was doing IMAG. The video director said to me "I hope you build your slides as lower-thirds". I hadn't, but that wasn't a problem. I simply said "yep", then went in to the slide properties settings, made a few adjustments, and instantly went from full-verse/full-screen slides with a background, to lower third, line-by-line slides with a black background (the video team was using luma key).

After making these changes, I worked with the worship leader to set up the verse orders for each song. Even though the program was now set up for line-by-line lower thirds, SongShow Plus keeps the verses in order even when re-arranging them. I was thinking about how challenging this would be if I had to move and manipulate groups of line-by-line slides in PowerPoint.

Once the production started, I noticed that I had left the fade transition enabled. While this normally looks good on a regular screen, in this case, the transition looked a bit odd on the large video display we were using. Between songs, I was able to quickly pull up the slide properties for the program, disable the transition, then move on to the next slide.

As is often the case, the verse order communicated to me didn't match the actual verse order the worship leaders used. Fortunately, SongShow Plus is flexible enough so that I could present slides out of order when necessary.

The production went well. While the songs were common and, I assume, familiar to many, I trust that providing the lyrics to the video helped people participate and not just spectate.

(BE304)

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