Philip Khor

Four weeks of dew crew training / probation had led to this weekend’s occasion!

It started off with Thursday night with the rehearsals. It is usually a relaxing and slumber night of testing the equipment; figuring out how things will work. The musicians, dancers and DEW crew (a/v production crew) have a short time of devotion and ice breaker, then we head off to our respective stations. A lot of things are happening simultaneously to make the DUMC experience what it is. The stage sound guys will run through the long and tedious process of mic checking and testing the musical instruments levels. There’s a separate mix of output for the worship leader, the backup singers and the instruments. There’s this cool box that allows you to listen to an individual track, inputted via Ethernet cable (the same stuff that connects your PC to your wired broadband) You can reverse engineer it to listen to two or more tracks to get past the “1-track limitation”, but I won’t tell you how!

As for the video guys, instructions are fed through a headset connected to the camera. We are shooting on standard definition broadcast quality, essentially TV1, TV3 digital quality lah! The zoom is amazing, whilst the cameras rest on a podium (mini stage). The 4 cameras are assigned numbers and roles. Cam 1 and the left camera, giving a side profile of the stage. It is used for artistic purposes. During worship, there will be shots of the ceiling lights (down lights) then the Video Mixer will merge with a close up of the worship leader. It is used in transitions as well, from the center cameras (cam 2 and cam 3) during the sermon. On the stage running with a portable camera is Cam 4. Also used for artistic purposes, getting shots of the bass, guitars, drummers up close is a very very challenging job. A big angry gorilla like me kenot be trusted with the Cam 4 role! We try to be as discreet as possible.

First floor is the Front of House. They take care of the sound requirements of the entire auditorium (by no means an easy job!). It is also the loudest part of the auditorium because the center speakers are directly blasting out loud at over 90 dbi (i s’pose that’s loud?) During the probation, we get to experience the different sounds at different parts of the hall. There are some sweet spots, loud spots, and blind spots. It is particularly challenging for the FOS people because the elderly members like it soft, while the younger generation like it max max volume. Then you have to take account of the kids, and the amount of people filled in the 2500 capacity auditorium. It sounds different all the time. Therefore soundcheck Thursday is very vital!

Second floor is the Video room. There are 2 PCs for visual aids, a Video mixer, Person-In-Charge, and recording equipment that we record the sermon for sale, and the whole celebration on DVD for internal uses only. The racks of equipment for the camera controls are also located here. Once the mixer is happy with the output, the Powerpoint PC will overlay graphics and slides before the final output gets to the 3 big projectors. Projector control is via a Linux box with a simple interface. It controls the house lights by clusters and sections. Oh, there’s an artistic lighting on First floor which give you floral patterns, strobe lights, and the many colours. Now that box runs on Windows XP (haha). Lots of Maths x,y coordinates and % intensity figures flash out whenever a preset is selected. It has 18 banks of presets, and it is quite a joy to watch the lighting guy play the switch board.

Sometimes Thursday practise ends 10:30pm, sometimes later.

Saturday 5pm worship was better of the two. I was totally new to the camera controls and tripod tightness, it was quite a nightmare. But we made it throught.

Sunday 10am, it was very challenging. Worship, it’s easy because there are 3 other cameras to choose from. The Cam 4 stage roaming cam is the one who gets most air time. It was pretty decent overall. But when it comes to sermon time, all pressure on Cam 2 and Cam 3 (which I was on). Cam 1 is there to help out during transitions. I didn’t lock it tight enough. But although some other videographers recommended NOT to lock it 100%, I didn’t really have experience on what to do. Furthermore the Cam 3 was a bit challenging itself; because the knobs react differently. In the end, Emily (the supervisor) had to adjust for me. Still, my hands were not stable. The words “not stable” is still ringing in my head, after being repeatedly told of my shaky shots.

I tried not to be disheartened. Although very shy and embarrassed, I will pick myself up and get ready for the next challenge in early September! Thank you to my fellow crew-mates for being patient with my noobness. And thanks for the advice. Will perform better next time!

(p/s Yang Wei suggested pics for a boring blog post)

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