Q&A with Storme Wood
Storme Wood is a ten year veteran of producing and using video to reach, teach, entertain and inform churches, businesses and individuals. He worked as a full time Media Director for Gateway Church in Austin TX and co-founded the church media production company eleven72.
ECHO: How did get into video production and learn the ropes?
SW: The first step in my journey was studying for a Radio Television Film degree at the University of Texas. I started taking production classes, getting to check out cameras, shooting documentaries for class projects, learning to edit old school by actually cutting film and editing tape deck to deck. I also volunteered and got involved with a local experimental film group that was shooting Super 8 films at the time. So I was beginning to learn, to experiment, to figure things out by getting my hands dirty. About that time, I started going to a little start up church called Gateway. I was at a church BBQ one day and the Associate Pastor, Ted Beasley, struck up a conversation with me. When he learned I was a film school student, he got really excited about us doing videos for the church. So, over the next few years, I made films for film school, experimental films for the Cinemaker Coop and short videos and multimedias for Gateway Community Church here in Austin. And that’s how I got started.
ECHO: What kinds of things can Echo attendees expect to learn in your breakout session, Church Video Tips and Tricks?
SW: I plan on keeping things really practical at my session. We’re going to talk about basic things you can do with the camera, with the lights, with audio, with editing to get solid results. These will be tips and tricks I’ve picked up from slogging it out in production for the last ten years. What can you do to get better footage for your videos? What can you do to shoot better interviews? What can you do to make your edits have more power and impact? These are the things I’m going to talk about. And I’m going to talk in terms that can be easily understood and easily put into practice.
ECHO: What were some of the challenges you faced while creating church media resources at eleven72? What was the most rewarding part about creating those resources for local churches?
SW: Some of our biggest challenges at eleven72 were creating really good, useful, on point videos on a budget. We had to be really creative in distributing our resources so that we could produce short films and videos that had the production value and quality of story, acting, etc, that people in our culture expect and that we could feel good about.
The most rewarding part about creating video resources for local churches is knowing that your videos get to play a part in that awesome Sunday experience in hundreds of churches; That you were able to help them pull off their service, to help a pastor make his point, or to give a congregation pause to laugh or think about a particular subject. That your videos are a part of the process that God is using to draw people to Himself, that’s the greatest reward (and honestly quite humbling). It’s also really fun when you run into people who saw one of your videos or when you have relatives call and say that their church used one of your videos or when you see that someone in the Philippines or in Uzbekistan or South Korea downloaded one of your videos and to kind of have your mind blown by the fact that your videos are being shown in churches all over the world.