For the last few days, I’ve been working in Germany on a series of six live webcasts for The Salvation Army’s European Youth Event. The premise: 600 young people from right across the continent convene in Altenkirchen (not a million miles from Köln) for a lively time together.

My role was to get all the content that wasn’t camera-generated on screen at the right time. That’s essentially name captions, song titles, lyrics, copyright attributions, credits and contributions from the Twittersphere. Being a youth event, the graphics were a little more funky than usual – animating on and off the screen in a manner that stretched the technology and my nerve to the limit.

As this was very much a ‘budget’ event (most of the young people were camping, though mercifully I’d got a hotel room with wi-fi to retreat to), we were producing the content ourselves. The camera operators were all volunteers from Norway, under the expert tuition of Brett – a colleague from the UK headquarters. Mark, the head of The Salvation Army’s international headquarters IT department, was directing and vision mixing with Sylvester, one of the IT support team, making sure we stayed on air.

We had to cope with quite a few last-minute changes to the plan, such as a hitherto undiscovered requirement to display tweets on the auditorium screens (thanks, Twitterfall). And a presenter who requested quite a few Bible readings to appear on-screen for all to read out (thanks, Bible Gateway). And, perhaps most terrifyingly, a complete loss of internet access about 12 minutes before we were supposed to start our live coverage of one of the morning sessions.

The flexibility and creativity of the AV team made it a great place to be, even with some of the technical, logistical and personal issues that had to be overcome. I escaped from my green screen operations several times, to vision mix, cable pull and operate one of the cameras for a while.

Here I am, out in the wild:

The event itself was immensely encouraging – even backstage, the atmosphere was electric. Many young people responded to God’s call, with some becoming Christians and others taking steps towards becoming full time Salvation Army officers.

As the Communications team representative, I also had the responsibility for putting together the international news report – difficult to convey in a single report how vibrant the event was, but at least the webcasts remain online to give a flavour.