Worship with Projection 101

Yesterday I presented my first worship service, a short intergenerational service called Wellspring Wednesday. I tried something new for this worship, and prepared a set of projected images to support my message. It seemed to go well, and the children, who often get squirmy, paid careful attention.

When I watched Al Gore present on-stage in "An Inconvenient Truth", I was amazed at the software he used, and realized it was essentially Keynote, Apple's presentation software. I immediately bought a copy, and loaded it on my trusty Mac iBook G4. I've since added a Griffin Airclick USB remote control, so I can advance slides while away from the computer.

I built my slideshow as simply as possible: a set of images with no fancy transitions. I used a combination of my own images and photos downloaded from flickr. I was careful to use only images that were shared under Creative Commons licenses; you can restrict your search in flickr to these under advanced search. I did add a credits screen at the end. I included some text screens for song lyrics, these were the simplest white font on black. (Note that licensing is a concern when projecting lyrics.)

One of the places where Keynote really shines is during the presentation. The screenshot above shows what you see on your notebook screen. The projector is showing the left image, and the right image is the next image. I am amazed at how valuable knowing what the next image is when you are trying to ad lib a transition to that image. Having the time of day is useful too, though the elapsed time was less useful to me. Notes are below, also, and were very helpful as a stress reduction tactic.

Our projector, on an old AV cart, and a portable screen left over from the 1960s rounded out the equipment list. I worried about light pouring in through stained glass windows behind me, but the sun was low enough so that wasn't a problem.

Technically, things went without a hitch. When worship was done, I raced the computer and the AV cart down to another meeting room where a workshop using DVD clips was to be conducted, and that, too, went without any glitches. We trust our technology so much more these days. I didn't even have a real back-up plan in place -- a far cry from the days when I would routinely carry overhead transparencies or printouts in case something went wrong.