Posts Tagged ‘Video’

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What If Reading the Bible on My Mobile Was Like Stepping Into the Middle of a Video

Thursday, May 24th, 2012

Mobile phone in hand with green screen
I have had this article about embodied cognition from Contents Magazine sitting in a tab or Evernote for the better part of two weeks. Each time I glance and reflect on it, I am left asking the question “why is the Bible I read on my digital devices so flat?” I have my own project (All Books) that in some ways seems to be addressing a temporal association to the text, but really, much of what we interact with in the Bible isn’t text, it’s emotion, space, activity. 

There is a sense to find your imagination around you while reading the Scriptures, but very little that you can do until you read all of the associated historical, sociological, and theological commentary around it. In a real sense, you have to create the world around which you can view Scripture within its lens (that is, if you are event interested in hearing it in the voice that it was written in). But, isn’t that kind of looking at things the wrong way – fitting that world into your own? What if the engaging of a Bible on a digital device (a digital window if you will) were more like stepping in on a conversation happening, and your digital window wasn’t text at all, but a series of still and moving images, mono and stereo audio – where you were always coming into the middle of a moment, no merely being in the seat of the narrator?

I am thinking almost in the sense that each of characters or books in the Bible are a channel. Each of these channels plays content that maps directly to the written text, but loops mich like an audio playlist. You only get to choose the character or book though. As soon as you make that selection, you are locked into wherever that story is happening right at that moment. This would be something like the Bible Experience audio series, but instead of simply walking into something narrated, you would literally be coming into still images or a performed program.

If you will, recapturing some of the creative energies that are used to display and tell the events of Scripture in layers, leaving the text as perhaps a caption or linked reference (similar to the Info/Guide button on a cable TV station). Again looking at engaging the text not from the perspective of studying, but more from the attitude of tuning into see what this channel of life is up to.

I know, it sounds like basically taking TV/YouTube as just running it all the time. But, I am asking for a bit more. Where the viewer doesn’t have control of where they come into the scene. Where there is no rewind. What if when you took your mobile, while reading in your favorite bible app, from the position of having your head down, to picking your head and mobile up (similar to holding it for taking a picture) and then Scritpture that you were just reading started to play like a movie in front of you. That’s what I am thinking here.

 

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Mobile Industry Review and the Emporia Telecom Series

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

For a number of weeks now, Mobile Industry Review has been doing a series with Emporia Telecom, a company whose mobile offerings are designed around the needs of those persons who might be older or have needs for simpler and easier to undestand mobile devices. I hesitate to pigeon-hole their offerings into something just for an older audience, because everyone can do with better designed user interfaces, attention to detail/behavior, and such. But, their focus on this group is notable, specifically because it seems to follow along the lines of what we were getting at with our 4th resolution, intentional design decisions and UIs/UXs which follow mobile perspectives.

The Mobile Industry Review series has about six videos (at the time of writing) already published. I’d encourage you to take a look at them:

While watching these videos, or after watching them, consider these points in view of what you are planning or doing in respect to mobile ministry:

  • Does your application or service not just include smartphone and non-smartphone users, but the various ranges of age groups within each?
  • How does your application or service scale to age groups where information is consumed and retained in a different bucket than a UI guide’s recommended “lines per screen?”
  • How do you track or model healthier communication behaviors across age/demographic groups?

A step perhaps towards addressing that resolution by seeing the wisdom of designing for those who carry the most wisdom in many of our communities.

 

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A MobiMedia for Churches Idea

Friday, January 13th, 2012

During my vacation (last week of 2011), I visited the church my best friend attends in PA and got a chance to meet the elder in charge of operational items for the church. My bro plugged me and what I’ve been doing with MMM and we got into a quick conversation about the church’s move into TV/broadcasting that they expect for this year. In listening, I started to ask why they are looking to go broadcasting, but changed my question to something a bit different. This is a paraphrase of what I proposed to him:

A TV/broadcast ministry for the size of church that you have will need probably about 5-6 dedicated people. You’ll want 2 camera persons, a video tech, a sound tech, and then a production manager to keep all of those together. You’ll probably need to have one of those persons, if not someone (or 2) else to take the content and do any further graphic/sound editing to the final product. And then there’s likely someone on that team, if not another team entirely that is going to be responsible for putting it on a website and making it “press ready” for other local stakeholders who’d want to rebroadcast it. That’s a lot of folks. 

Many of the members have mobile devices (feature phone, smartphones, and tablets were all visible during the service I attended). Why not create mobile media (mobimedia) teams in which people can sign up and do one of three things: recording video, recording audio, and taking still pictures. Ideally, you’d want to make sure that you keep the groups mixed so that the devices are being used within their best capacity, but then you end up with the people who are part of your community, giving a view of a service or event from their perspective, not just the one that’s most camera friendly.

You would then have just two positions to create for the community: a production designer/manager who would be responsible for taking all of the content from the devices, and then creating the “official” video that goes public, and a public relations-like person who would field questions/comments from the public/stakeholders.

When I proposed this to that elder, it was like a light bulb went off. He never considered that (a) the normal design of doing multimedia would need so many layers of people and processes and that (b) it would be possible to include the community in such a way that they’d have a greater sense of ownership of the community and the preached Gospel message.

Now, there are a few things here. You aren’t going to get RED camera quality video or Dolby quality audio from everyone’s mobiles, so you’d want to make sure that you have some kind of grid that would allow you to see the quality of video/audio/stills so that you can organize your teams appropriately. Then again, there was this movie shot entirely on a Nokia N8, so quality isn’t really a question right?

You’d want to make sure that you design a policy that allows people to keep whatever they record, but with the statement that if they make their’s public that it cannot be considered official content from the church. So, you might have a Flickr/YouTube gallery that they would all upload the pics/videos to, but then have something of an official “set” that becomes the public-facing gallery. You’d also have some streams for training that would have to be taken up. For example, you’d definitely want to do a workshop talking about how to best take photos/videos during a service (mindful of flash, camera sounds, zoom, etc.). There might only be a few folks who can do this well in your churches now, but what if that few turned into a few folks from your teen, college, and senior ministries? Considering that many mobiles really are just fine in doing this, these are the kinds of thoughts you’d want to have going into it.

I’m of the opinion that mobiles and people are ready for doing this. But, if I’m to pull this off, I’d have to start a church or something to prove it (uhmmm, the people formerly known as congregation) or just point to those folks already doing it in similar genres (Mobile Media Toolkit, hint, hint).

So, now I throw this one out there to you. Some of you are in churches of similar size (<250 people) and have similar contexts (cable channel access, many mobile devices, need to provoke greater involvement from community, etc.). Couldn’t this work for you? And if it couldn’t (because there’s some unspoken rule about using the latest greatest cameras/tools/tech, this is just not normal, we don’t have money/resources, etc.), then why? 

 

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