Secret Church: Who Am I?
Who Am I?

A large-scale teaching series and refugee fundraiser: Secret Church

The problem

Secret Church is a live teaching event, hours of it, delivered to a room and simulcast to an international audience. The job was to turn a single live event into finished content that worked in two places at once: a live audience in the room and viewers streaming around the world, in more than one language. On top of that, the project carried a second mission: raise money for Afghan refugees who had fled the Taliban.

Two hard problems in one. Take a sprawling live event and make it clean, watchable, and translatable. And tell the refugees' story powerfully enough to move people to give, without ever putting the refugees themselves at risk.

What we did

On production, I ran B camera and looked after the talent. In post, which I led, I took forty separate assets from the live event and built them into three tight sessions, over six hours of finished content, exported for both the live room and international streaming, with English and Spanish subtitles cut alongside local Spanish speakers to get the translation right.

The refugee film was the hardest part. When we got to the interviews, these were people who had just come off the plane from Afghanistan, still raw, and they did not want to be on camera. We weren't going to push them. So we changed the setup instead: lit them from behind and exposed to the windows, so their faces fell into shadow. They could tell their story fully, and stay completely unidentifiable. It let us keep their humanity on camera without ever putting them at risk. The post was emotionally heavy, and it had to be. The whole point was to make people feel enough to act.

The result

The sessions delivered for both the live audience and the international stream. And the refugee film did its job, it raised the funds it set out to raise. This is also the work behind a line you'll see elsewhere on this site: filming Afghan refugees in their first free moments. This is where that happened.