Such a privilege to work with the team on this project. Some of my favorite people who are all passionate about the work, the message, and most importantly, the impact.
Tower Cam on the Jesus Generation Tour
Just wrapped filming on Forrest Frank's Jesus Generation Tour. I was on the doc crew with Concept Pixels, shooting for a documentary film of the run, operating a Tower Cam on stage.
If you did not catch the scope of this tour, it was 29 cities from June through August. In-the-round stage, mostly stadiums and outdoor venues. Cory Asbury leading worship, Tori Kelly opening, The Figs working the crowd on the way in. Nearly half a million tickets before the first show.
A few things I have been chewing on since we tore down.
The tower is a real position, not a novelty
A Tower Cam on an in-the-round show exists because there is no back of house to shoot from. There is no upstage. There is no camera platform sitting safely behind the audience where nobody can see you. The stage is an island and the room wraps all the way around it.
So you go up. Elevated, on the deck, inside the footprint. You get the high angle down onto the artist and past him into the crowd on the far side, which is a frame you cannot buy from any other position in that room.
The cost is that you are in the show. Physically in it. Every person in that stadium has a sightline to you.
In the round, there is no back
This is the part that resets your habits fast.
In a normal room somebody built you a place to hide. You have a wall to work against and a side the audience never sees, and that is where all the technical behavior lives. Shifting your weight. Adjusting a strap. Scratching your face.
None of that exists here. Every angle is somebody's front row. If you move, four thousand people watch you move.
You end up making everything smaller. Slower repositions. Tighter footwork. Adjustments that take three seconds instead of one because you cannot be the thing that pulls someone out of the moment they came for.
Shooting for an edit is a different job than shooting for a feed
Live, you serve the moment while it is happening. The cut goes out and the whole value of it lives inside four seconds.
Doc is the opposite problem. You are shooting for someone who is going to watch this alone, months from now, with no crowd and no low end in their chest. Whatever the room carried has to survive that trip, and the only vehicle is the frame.
Practically it means you hold longer. Way longer than feels right if you came up on IMAG. The moment that plays in the edit is almost always a beat after the moment that would have made a good cut.
Tours reward the operator who stops covering
Here is the thing about a routed tour that a Sunday will never give you. The show is the same every night.
By the third city you know what happens at minute forty-two. You know where he moves, when the lights drop out, which song the room sings the loudest. Once you stop having to cover the show, you can start choosing.
That is when the good material shows up. You spend your attention on the crowd instead of the setlist, because you already know the setlist. Repetition is not boring on a doc crew. It is the whole advantage.
The crowd was the story
This audience skewed young. A lot of students. A lot of families with kids who knew every word.
Some of the strongest footage from my position had nothing to do with the stage. It was a section of teenagers who had clearly come together and had not stopped singing since the first song. You do not have to hunt for that. You just have to be willing to leave the artist and let the camera sit on people.
What did not change
I have been saying the same thing to camera teams for a long time. Worshipper first, camera operator second.
Bigger rig, longer load-ins, tighter comms discipline, a crew that does not tolerate slack. None of that touched the actual assignment. The frame still knows whether you are present or just executing, and everyone downstream can feel the difference even if nobody can name it.
Bezalel was filled before he was given the work. That order has not changed for anybody holding a tool in a room where God is moving.
Grateful
Thanks to the Concept Pixels team for the call, and for running a crew that held standard for two months straight without slipping.
Now the footage goes to the edit, where somebody I will never meet decides which frames make it. Most will not. That is the job. But some of them will land in front of a person sitting alone in a room somewhere, and they will feel something they did not walk in expecting.
That part never gets old.