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GNTV: Travelling from Oklahoma City to Macon, Ga.

Hello readers! So much has happened since my last posting!

Today I’m in my hometown of Macon, Ga. for the South Georgia Annual Conference.

An “annual conference” is a yearly meeting of a Methodist Church district. Each church sends a clergy (an official or “ordained” pastor) and a lay (non-pastor) delegate from their home church or Methodist organization, and they make presentations and vote on the business essentials of the district.

Annual conferences are the bulk of the live events GNTV covers during our busy summer months. Conferences we cover include Oklahoma, South Georgia, Kentucky, West Virginia, New York, and Baltimore-Washington to name a few. Crews split up to cover as much ground as possible. It means a lot of late nights, early mornings and many a meal is eaten standing up.

Let me take you back a little bit. Last week, my crew and I covered the Oklahoma Annual Conference in Oklahoma City. We piled into an auditorium at Oklahoma City University as honored guests of St. Paul Theological Seminary at OCU, and worked with the conference communications staff and another group of equipment riggers to ensure that the conference went smoothly.

I was on graphics duty.

In our world, “graphics” refers to videos, PowerPoints, images and anything that might be put up on the big screen for folks to see that does not include live cameras.

As graphics runner, I controlled two computers that fed live feeds to Ratchet, who was running the switcher. The switcher is what controls the images people see on the big screens. Ginger, Sully, and another new intern (let’s call him Stitch) ran cameras that also sent feeds to the switcher. Ratchet calls the shots for the cameras and monitors the screens. We all wear headsets, so we can communicate while sessions are running.

Because annual conference is a church function, both business and worship are involved. In Oklahoma, all of the worship sessions were held at a local church that had their own A/V team, so they didn’t need us. We only ran business. This week, at South Georgia, we’re running both.

Ginger and I are switching places at the down front camera and at graphics. I run graphics for the business sessions, and she runs them for the worship sessions. It’s exciting, but it means that no one gets to sit still.

Here at South Georgia, we’ve been hopping like crazy. We set up the entire Macon Coliseum for the event in one day, and we haven’t eaten a real sit-down meal since we started. It’s fun though! I love it.

Ginger and I are getting to be real good friends, and Sully and I get along much better than we did last year.

We’re supposed to be breaking down the South GA setup after the conference ends this afternoon. Our boss says it will be a crazy late night—past midnight!

I’m looking forward to being finished, though.

We finish up here tonight, and then tomorrow we will take all of our equipment back to the office, unload it, repack it for South Carolina and Kentucky annual conferences, load that onto the trucks and get ready to head out for Kentucky the next morning.

Wow! Should be insanely busy. I’ll try to have more for you soon, readers!

Stay tuned for a special treat from the SGAC!

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