Citizen Church

Citizen Church is a HTB Church plant located in Cathays, Cardiff. It was originally planted from Harbour Portsmouth, another church situated within the HTB network. Citizen Church was planted in the summer of 2020 by Ryan Forey and his team. The Church was granted access to use the Church of St Andrew & St Teilo, located on Woodville road in Cathays, as their first plant. Since then the Church has grown massively despite the lockdowns and restrictions which occurred due to COVID while Citizen was establishing itself.

I was directed towards Citizen after helping out at HTB in London, and I joined Citizen during my last year of University. I became a volunteer working as the main production person within the Church. On a week by week basis I would ensure that everything from ProPresentor to VMIX, Lighting to Sound, was all working and ready for the other volunteers when they arrived. I also troubleshooted any potential problems that the Church had from a technical point of view, such as networking issues or firmware issues regarding devices within the production area. Alot of the church staff who wanted access to the production equipment had never used equipment like this, so for most equipment and online services I recorded training videos and wrote manuals to help them understand what they were doing. Using 2D architectural drawings I rebuilt the church in 3D using VectorWorks. This became really helpful for previsualisation for lighting but also general planning of events.

During COVID, the church decided that it wanted to livestream its services. When I heard about this, I started work on systems which could be used. With the help and knowledge from other industry experts, I weighed up the pros and cons for a complete network video system, NDI, and an SDI system. Below was the system diagram I made and proposed for an SDI based system. The church decided to go with the networked based video system using NDI throughout the church. Part of the integration implemented by an external contractor was using VMix as the video switching system. I was keen for the church to use the 4K version of VMix since it allowed for control of PTZ cameras, meaning that we could set up positions for the PTZs within VMix. This worked really well for multiple camera shots which were always in focus and could be switched to quickly. The output of the livestream was broadcast to Youtube via RESI. In the event that the stream ever went down or we had technical issues, I wrote a script to automatically record the VMix output every Sunday at 11:00AM. The script ensured that even if the user forgot to start the recording, it would automatically happen.