Once we have devised a list of all the ideas that we have and condense them down into categories we begin to ask the questions:
- Where do we feel God is leading us?
- What do we feel needs to be discussed?
Based off of these two questions we begin to put topics on the calendar. For example:
- October-Porn, Health, Gossip
- November-Finances
- December-Christmas Theme
At this point we most likely do not have creative titles yet but we are developing a skeletal system. We are discussing the big idea of each week and the scripture that anchors it all together. The next step is to flesh out exactly where the series needs to go, what it will look like, smell like, sound like.
We took the month of October and decided that the best approach was to build off of National Porn Sunday with the theme of confronting the elephant in the pew. As a team we kicked around the idea of calling the series: EXPOSED! EXPOSING THE ELEPHANTS IN OUR LIVES.
After a little more dialog we decide to title each week:
- EXPOSING Porn.
- EXPOSING your body.
- EXPOSING your tongue.
Once the titles are in place we hand off the ball to our different teams to work on graphics/promo/videos/message development.
As you can see this isn’t a perfect process but it works thus far. I think the biggest part of the planning process is that it makes you look up long enough to see where you are headed and make sure you are moving in the right direction.
So what does your creative/planning process look like?
For us, most of what we plan is done per team. The series vision come from our Sr. Pastor and is passed on to me.
- I sit down with our graphics person and together we flesh out a visual theme idea. Sometimes we both work on the actual design and sometimes one of us gets in a flow and we do it on our own.
- I then move on to meet with my video/visual team. We talk through “Man on the Street” possibilities, creative video shoots, a “pre-roll” for the series as well as a general visual look for the series. We then assign each project to a team member.
- then I meet with our drama driector and give her the series outline. She’ll come up with several idea that may work. We then par those ideas down alongside our Sr. Pastor so he can see which drama best represents the message.
-Lastly we generally meet as a team to make sure the details are in place to launch the series.
Man that was long…sorry ’bout that.
You guys are doing great. I’ve worked in the corporate world for a long time and most companies don’t understand the value of planning and the creative process yet they wonder why they aren’t successful at anything. Great job and keep going!