71o1 is a project that has been public for 11 months, but was in development for about a year before the first show.
If you haven’t ever seen it, 71o1 is the name of our church video announcements. It takes its name from our church address, 71o1 Bayshore Road. It also references one of the two unique features of our announcements – that each video is 71 seconds or less. Originally I planned to advertise it as 71.01 seconds or less, but we simplified it.
The other key feature, and the one which I think really sets it apart from every other church announcement package on the planet, is that we do a new video everyday. Every. Day. More about that in a minute.
There is an exception for each of those features. The exception to the 71 second rule is that videos that are seen during church services (the Sunday and Wednesday evening editions) are most always longer.
The exception to the everyday rule is more an addition than an exception, because on Wednesdays there are two videos. In our first eleven months we have done over 370 shows.
Back in 2011, I first began thinking about how I would do our church video announcements. I knew they needed to be interesting, concise, and visually attractive. My first hurdle was equipment. I had acquired a little HD handheld camcorder, and I thought it would be the easiest way to go. Our other camera option was a large JVC professional-grade HD(ish) camera. We had used the JVC mainly to record Scrooge and other projects around the church. The problem was that it uses DV tapes. Yes, tapes. Very 2003. This meant a long time capturing the video and getting it ready to edit.
The little HD camcorder would solve this problem. It has an SD card slot, so you can record directly to disk. I figured HD would be the best format, too.
As I thought about the project, I realized that I wanted to do something more than a simple church video announcement thing. Church video announcements were becoming more and more common. I wanted uncommon. I wanted a hook, something no one else was doing.
No one is doing announcements everyday. That’s ridiculous. Not only is it hard to come up with new announcements everyday, but the time demands of editing the video would be unworkable.
But I knew everyday was the thing to do. I started thinking about one minute as the goal. Announcements in one minute or less. This comes from my familiarity with a couple of podcasts, The One Minute Tip from John Chambers and GeekBeat.TV with Cali Lewis.
The One Minute Tip is something I would hear from time-to-time on Adam Christianson’s Maccast. (I love the Maccast. It’s the first podcast I ever listened to, and the podcast that got me started podcasting. I still listen weekly.) Chambers would send in special Maccast One Minute Tips, and they were concise and to the point, yet they always carried a lot of information.
I’ve heard, seen, and been part of much longer podcasts. The first panel-type podcast I ever heard was the Simply Youth Ministry Podcast by Doug Fields and friends. (It actually didn’t have a name when I listened to it, but it belonged to SYM at the time. It is now Youth Ministry Garage.) They were always more than an hour, and I thought they were great. Adam’s Maccast, TWIT’s This Week in Tech and MacBreak Weekly are also long shows that I have enjoyed.
But for daily use, the shorter the better. This leads us to the other podcast I watched regularly from the first show – Cali Lewis’s GeekBeatTV. Back in the day it had a different name (GeekBrief), but the idea was the same – a show everyday, short, with usually a funny little outtake at the end.
I never cared much for the outtakes. And in time, I’ve fallen away from watching the show. But it was an inspiration, because it proved that everyday was a doable thing.
Since then I’ve become a regular listener to another daily show, MacOSKen from Ken Ray. It reinforces the idea that news everyday can be done, as long as you throw a little humor into it. MacOSKen is the inspiration for another podcast idea I have that still remains on the back burner. (Someday, perhaps.)
Time to go to bed. I’ll finish this later…