Did you know some churches were doing multi-media before personal computers were heard of?
I used to spend hours – no, days – gathering 35mm slides and sorting them on light boxes, creating a visual presentation to enhance choir musicals. Usually we used 2 projectors with a dissolve unit, but when we wanted to get über fancy, we went to the third projector. The third unit was for title slides, and it seemed like the frontier of ultra-modern communication at that time. Our choirs usually sang to recorded tracks. No, they weren’t CD’s. We used a reel to reel 4-track tape deck, with 10-inch reels.
The Technique
Here’s how the process went:
- Gather slides from helpful people.
- Figure out a story board and start eliminating pictures.
- Arrange the best photos on a light board.
- Start loading them alternately: slide 1 in the left carousel, slide 2 in the right, 3 in the left, etc. (This while keeping in mind the slide had to go in upside down and backwards.)
- During the process you had to remember where you wanted a blank screen and insert a cardboard dummy slide. (Later projectors automatically detected a missing slide and gave the needed blank screen.)
When that was done, I double-checked by cycling through the pictures manually using the dissolve unit to be sure the flow all made sense. If a slide was off by one, it meant that you had to move a whole series of them. That involved criss-crossing between carousels, moving slides from right to left and left to right to get the order fixed.
When all was in order, the fun started. Here’s how programming worked:
- Set up the dissolve unit by connecting the signal output to the input of an unused track on the tape deck.
- Play the music.
- Manually record cues to time the slide movement with the music.
- Start over on the song if you get one cue wrong – even if it’s the next to last cue.
- Keep doing that until you fall asleep or finish, whichever is first.
- Rewind the tape.
- Reset the carousels to zero.
- Reset the dissolve unit.
- Switch dissolve unit from record to play.
- Switch cable from output to tape deck to input from tape deck
- Test the whole show.
Days later, when it was all done, you could play the music for the choir and the deck ran the slide cues automatically. People in the late 70’s and early 80’s were wowed by that. We didn’t think it could be improved.
Can you say “Those were the days”?
It was fun, but what a time-vacuum. Things could go wrong too. If a carousel forgot to advance due to a corrupt signal or a jammed slide, your whole presentation would be off a half a beat. More than once I found myself frantically signaling (in stealth mode, of course) the tech person, or actually running to the machine to manually advance the offending carousel. To add to the intrigue, if you had a more than 160 slides, you had to have an alert operator change out the carousels at the right moment while things were running! No time for boredom. (There were 140-slide carousels, but they tended to jam too easily.)
If the dissolve unit fritzed out on you, you were done. This happened to me once during a slide presentation carefully prepared to celebrate the high school graduates of our congregation. The dissolve unit shorted on a cue, and that was that. No coaxing could change the situation that Sunday morning. The music continued; the slides didn’t. My good partner in ministry jumped to the rescue and we finished that program on the fly, now using hard cuts instead of the wonderful soft dissolves I’d programmed. We each used a piece of paper to alternately cut one projector image while the other manually advanced his projector. Great teamwork that was, but certainly an anticlimactic finish.
Technology has left all that in the dusty past. I actually kind of miss it, except for the time factor. It felt less sterile.
What do you think? What are your memories of now ancient technology used in worship gatherings? How much different do you think the use of technology will be in our culture and our worship gatherings in just 10 more years? What was actually better in your opinion than what we use now? How can what we now use be improved?
[Images via SeemsArtless, Fowlerville History, Pixtus]
Chuck McKnight says
Being an MK, I well remember my parents’ slide projector they used to give presentations while visiting churches. Good times!
Ken says
The carousels were a big improvement over those that had the linear slide magazine. Those are the kind my memory associates most with missionary slide shows. “Technical difficulties!”
Tim Hollinger says
Ahhh those were the days. I invested (wasted?) many of my hours and days as a student at Moody creating 2 and 3 projector shows for myself and various groups. We were advanced enough to have three and four-track Tascam cassette players designed for the task. My favorite show used the 4-track reel-to-reel with stereo audio on 1&2, the control signal on track 4 and I recorded the audience’s live response on track 3. That was high tech. And then the school hired a professional group to come in and create a massive multi-projector show to promo the school. I don’t remember the details but it was displayed on between 12-20 octagonal screens with probably 2 or 3 projectors per screen. In those days it was AWESOME but probably laughable compared to today’s video walls. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Ken says
Tascams were prime in those days! However, my favorite was also the reel-to-reel 4-track, and I used it the same way, except for using the 3rd track to record live response.
I also saw a couple of multi-projector presentations as you mention, the most memorable being a Campus Crusade show. I still think people today would think it was awesome when they understood the way it was done (for example, precise slide registration) and the motion effects that were possible. Think of the planning!
Thanks for taking the memory lane trip with me.
Chris Rouse says
“Using Visual Aids in a Church” by Earl Waldrup (on Amazon) is all about this. Copyright 1949. This is a very early study on using visual aids in church (hence the title) and talks about the best way to use them and when/why not to use them. It’s a fascinating look into how the church did visual aids decades before computers, the Internet, and programs like ProPresenter, even existed.
Ken says
Thanks! I’d love to take a look at that book. I didn’t realize that churches were looking at this issue in 1949.
Paul Clifford says
I took a class at a creative ministries conference as a teen on this type of multi-media, but never got into it until I took “Technology in Ministry” in seminary in 2000. Then using Powerpoint seemed to make it click. I started with PP ’97 and went from there. Very fun.
Ken says
It would be interesting to know how many churches still use PowerPoint now that all the newer, more specifically designed presentation programs have been developed. Yes, lots of fun.
Eric J says
Wow that is amazing! So much manual work!
Ken says
Yes it was, Eric! But it was also very satisfying when it finally came together.