Good Fridays - Some Notes on The Event

This series of posts relates to our Good Fridays event, and this was one of those occasions where I'd started with a visual idea for telling the story in the space we have.  On the night we had a central tower from which we  projected onto four screens arranged on the four sides of the space, so viewed from above you'd see a sort of cross shape of light if all four were on.

The Fridays Planning Team gave definition to the visual idea, coming up with the plan of telling the four stories you'll find in the other posts.  The plan was to tell the Easter story from four perspectives, and to create a visual story alongside the monologues which were read out.  Five young people 'volunteered' to be the cast for the stories.  It was a pretty major effort to bring it all together, and to physically create the space in the venue as well - Friday ended up being a fourteen hour working day for me!  At some points in the afternoon I started regretting the amount of work we'd created for ourselves, but in the end I was really pleased with what we did, because it became that early visual idea brought into reality, and because I genuinely felt like this was in God's honour - it felt like a good response of service in worship from me to what he's done for me.

Some practical details for you:

• Heather Feltham wrote Judas's story and John Q Public's story, I wrote Mary's and the Soldier's.
• The pictures were mostly taken on my Sony A700 with no additional equipment.  I processed them from RAW in Capture One (giving me much more latitude for e.g. changing exposure to suit the intent of the image).  Mostly I used Xara Extreme 3.2 to manipulate them into the finished images, combining them some images of old photography plates I found on the web (but can't remember the link for now).  I used GIMP for a couple, but Xara is much, much quicker for this sort of thing.
• The candle in the video was created from stills taken on the A700 at five frames per second.  I really like how that came out.

All in all I'm really pleased with how it all turned out.  This is not the way we normally communicate Easter, and for me creating the images felt like some enormous art project, and I'm no artist!  It would have been much less work to just do a sermon, but like I say, for me this was my response to Easter as well as putting on an event.  I'm not equally happy with all the images, some are better than others.  The time pressure and the sheer amount of images meant I ran out ideas a couple of times. If you've got any comments I'd really love to hear them, whether you were there on the night or have just perused it all on here.  I'll put the images on flickr too, so if you'd like to view them in a slideshow format head over there later on.