It’s hard enough to get 186 people to sing in synch, in tune, in the same room.
Now, imagine that some of the singers are in Australia, with others in Canada, England, Estonia, Mexico, Switzerland and, of course, New Jersey.
That’s exactly what Morristown’s Liquid Church has orchestrated. The church invited people from around the world to record Silent Night on their laptops and upload the videos to YouTube. Tech-savvy church members then spent one long day feverishly cobbling all the videos into a global carol-sing.
“I was thrilled. It sounded 10 times better than I thought it would,” said Dave Adamson, online pastor for Liquid Church.
The trailer is posted here; the full production will premiere at Christmas Eve services in Morristown (noon, 2 pm, 4 pm at the Hyatt Morristown), Nutley and New Brunswick, and during an online service.
Liquid Church borrowed the idea from composer Ed Whitacre, who spoke at the annual TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference about his popular experiment leading a 2,000-voice virtual choir.
To keep everyone in the same key, the church posted a reference video with musical accompaniment. Church member Jan Allen “conducted” the far-flung carolers. Dave, a guitarist and former Australian sports reporter, proudly says that no electronic “auto-tuning” was necessary in post production. Was anyone too awful to include in the final cut?
“All the other pastors here,” he replied.
Pleasant surprises included a woman who performed the song in sign language. Someone else submitted a Kermit the Frog impersonation. Others sang with their dogs. One entry even included a dancing Christmas tree in the background, Dave said.
From a technical standpoint, the toughest challenge for video editor Nick Chislett and audio engineer Tommy Hayes was the letter “S.” Some people draw it out, others clip it. It took 10 hours of painstaking editing to tame all this sibilance. The project had first-rate musical consultants in the husband-and-wife team of Elizabeth Southard and Gary Mauer, church members who have sung the lead roles in Phantom on Broadway.
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For Dave, 40, this is all far removed from his prior life as a Melbourne TV producer and reporter whose bread and butter was Australian football, a brutal stew of U.S. football, rugby, hockey and soccer that would have been a crowd-pleaser at the Roman Colosseum.
On his way to work, Dave would listen to podcasts of sermons by Tim Lucas, who started Liquid Church in Basking Ridge in 1999 and moved its headquarters to Morristown in 2007. The church says it has 2,000 “physical” members and between 200- and 300 who worship online.
Dave asked Tim if he could copy his formula down under; Tim hired Dave. Four years later, Dave and his family live in Madison and he preaches to an audience that includes . . . a lot of Aussies back home.
“I’ve gone from daily deadlines to one that’s longer-term,” Dave said. “Now, what I do has a lot more ongoing significance in people’s lives. It’s more important than football.”
He said virtual Silent Night attracted more singers than Ed Whitacre’s first attempt at this sort of thing. Next time, Liquid Church may solicit videos via email; some people are sheepish about posting YouTube videos that live forever.
“We asked people to step out of their comfort zones to sing publicly on YouTube,” Dave said.
But hey, aren’t churches in the Forever business?
