Richard Taylor's Blog - All things considered: Victory Church development

Many Pastors and Leaders have been asking how we managed to transform a dis-used industrial unit into an auditorium to house our ministry and as a church. I've managed to collate pictures from start through to completion and they tell the story themselves. When you take on a task such as this there's a few things you need to know.

1. What is the cost of refurbishment?

For us we used our own people and saved literally thousands of pounds, my estimate in making a venue like this work without all the latest media gadgets, lighting and PA is around £150,000. The key to saving is buying bulk and shop smartly with building suppliers. Avoid your B&Q's stores they can be very expensive.

2. How do you heat the building?

We use a warm air blower that sucks in the cold air from the building and recycles it at our desired set temperature. Getting the building warm is easy! Keeping it warm is the challenge, you need to think of ways of insulating as much as possible. We avoided a suspended ceiling due to the cost and decided to seal the roof and spray paint in dark grey.

3. How did you build your stage/platform?

We had a civil engineer on our team who drew out plans to ensure a safe structure was designed, we then built it ourselves. Using wood and chip board following a basic design but allowing under stage room for electrics and points for PA installation. Instead of building a wall at the back of stage we hung a theatre black drape which acts as a false wall.

4. What did you do with lighting?

We use sodium lights normally found in industrial units and modern shopping malls, on stage we just hung 3 scaffold bars and off them were the speakers and lights.

A word of wisdom here don't go mad on spending money you don't have to look trendy! Our equipment is all ex-hire but does the job. Keep it simple, people are not coming to be entertained but to worship and hear teaching. You will find that 80-90% of the use is listening to the preacher so get the sound and lighting right and effective before thinking about the other 10-20% use.

5. How do you record services video/podcast?

Capturing audio is simple all you need is an audio feed from your desk into a Mac/PC with whatever editing software you choose to use. On the video front we use 1 camera (HD) in a fixed position which means you don't need to worrying about an operator every week. The sermon is recorded on to an SD card transferred to on of the Mac's and edited with Final Cut Pro (you don't need FCP there are much cheaper options on the market). After edit we have a Vimeo account which allows 5GB of uploads a week which is more than enough. Worth mentioning is to cross post your uploads from Vimeo to twitter/facebook and any other social network tool you use. This is not an exhaustive list but hope it helps those of you who have asked the questions! The images below will give you an overview of the development.