Blog | 5 Tips to Make Your Production Better Today

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As creatives, we’re always on a journey to make the things we’re working on better. God is glorified when we use our gifts, talents, and skills to reflect his glory and declare his goodness. In today’s creative landscape, however, it can be easy to get overwhelmed by the thought of improving. The connectedness that the internet affords us gives us access to countless massive churches and creative groups that are doing incredibly beautiful things, but that can come with unrealistic ideals of what our smaller churches’ productions should look like. The budget, manpower, and time it takes to create much of what we see on YouTube, Instagram, and more is enormous. For many of us, it takes years of planning and saving to make big upgrades to our production systems, and even then, we often have to make tough decisions on what to prioritize.

Today’s blog isn’t about those big purchases and upgrades – it’s about the small things you can do today with just a few hours and a small budget.

Clean and Organize

I’ve talked about this before, and it will always remain relevant. For many creatives, the process is messy, but the product shouldn’t be. Throughout the week, the projects can create clutter, but by Sunday morning, your stage should be clean, week in and week out. Cables that aren’t plugged in should be struck, instruments that are unused should be removed from the stage, unless they serve an intentional visual purpose. Not only does this improve the aesthetic appeal of your services, but it makes set-up, tear-down, and troubleshooting exponentially easier.

Cleanliness should extend beyond your stage. Your tech booth, green room, and storage areas should be kept tidy as well. If you work with volunteers, they’ll appreciate the care put into making the workflow of their stations more organized, and if you have to track down a problem, the less mess, the easier it is to pinpoint a solution.

Reset Your Stage Lighting

It’s easy to take a “set it and forget it” approach to stage lighting, but overtime, the way you use your stage can shift subtly, and over time, you may find that your stage lighting is just a little wonky. Take a day regularly (even if its just once or twice a year), to intentionally reset your stage lighting so it is serving your purposes! Make sure people who are doing announcements, leading worship, and preaching are properly lit. Take some time to try out new lighting techniques. You can impact your production in a big way just by experimenting with using the equipment you already have in a different way.

Test your cables

Most of us have, at some point, come across a cable that wasn’t working. Far too often, in the moment, we pull that cable and toss it to the side to take care of later, only for someone else to come by and put it back in with the rest of the cables. It’s worth going through all of your cables from time to time, testing them, and repairing or throwing out the ones that don’t work. By being proactive about cable care and maintenance, you’ll prevent many troubleshooting scenarios and save yourself some headaches when you do have to troubleshoot an issue.

Dial in Your Projector Settings

If you have a projector, this is one of the easiest things you can do. Simply fire up your projector, and spend some time dialing in the settings. Make sure it’s focused, the brightness and contrast are correct, and the color adjustments are translating the colors of your slides correctly. Each room is going to be different based on the amount and type of light, so you may need to spend some time getting it just right, but it will be worth it!

Don’t Forget The Seats

For all the talk of what happens on the stage, don’t forget to pay attention to your attenders experience in their seats. Make sure trash is regularly picked up, out of date flyers and handouts are removed, and the area is clean. Try sitting in the seats in all different areas of the room to see what the visual experience is like. Often certain parts of a room trap certain frequencies, making the audio experience different depending on where you sit. This can shed a lot of light on complaints about the sound. Depending on your ambient light, the projectors may look different from different parts of the room, depending on glare. All of these elements make a difference to each individual attender, and while we can’t always make things perfect, knowing the limitations of your room is an important part of improving your production.

All in all, it’s often the little consistent things we do that have outsized impacts on our production. The big shiny new purchases are amazing, and we love new gear – but most of the time our jobs are to make do with what we have, and there’s a lot of joy and satisfaction to be found in being faithful in the small things.