What I didn’t say about Rob Bell’s NOOMA

I was at #medialit last week, a week long training course aimed at getting the Church to ‘do’ media better.  I daresay I’ll have a few posts about it, as it was an intense, fun, challenging week.

NOOMA Night

One of the interesting ‘after hours’ sessions (just before the pub, hurrah!) was to watch some of the famous NOOMA videos by Rob Bell, and discuss them. We watched one featuring a neighbour digging snow.

Surprisingly, for videos which are so popular, they polarised the group.  I came across as fairly anti – which is not how I see NOOMA or Rob Bell at all. Time to fess up.

The problem that NOOMA addresses

There is one overriding great thing about NOOMA. It attempts to move preaching-on-TV away from the depressing beginner’s mistake of literally putting preaching on TV.

If you’ve ever watched a ‘Christian Channel’ you will have seen this phenomena all over the place. A talking head paces up and down a stage, occasionally coming to rest behind a lecturn, still talking. Spoken stories are illustrated with spoken word pictures.

This works great in church. But on TV? 60 years of broadcast television experience tells us that this is dull. It’s almost an offense to the content, which can often be very good. The content isn’t the problem.

The problem is that television is a visual medium – and the spoken word isn’t.

No matter how much you gesticulate, how far or how fast you pace up and down, how animated you are – you’re still just talking. Talk is what makes Radio 5 live great. Not television.

Imagine the difference between watching your favourite soap acted out – and having a single ‘newsreader’ at a desk simply reading out the script for that soap in a single tone of voice. You get the idea.

In television, show don’t tell.

Why NOOMA works so well

The NOOMA videos move away from this in a number of ways, and as such are a breath of fresh air. Rob Bell is an animated speaker, and his content relates very strongly to real life. He speaks with ordinary language. He makes points that inform, challenge and inspire. He’s worth listening to.

Visually, NOOMA shorts are interesting as Rob sets himself inside one of the situations to illustrate what he’s talking about. A number of good quality production techniques are used – good lighting, crisp audio, nice colour grading, good editing, nice crane shots, shallow depth of field. All in all, NOOMA shorts look a bit like a movie.

Nothing else comes close at the moment in the Christian world.

And yet I want there to be more

The reason I came across quite negatively in the course is that for all the good there is, the production still isn’t a movie. It’s a clever way of showing a talking head – but it is a talking head. Whilst the production values seem high for preaching, they are not at all difficult to do; they are bread and butter for regional TV crews.

I think NOOMA is an exciting first step into the world of lecturing-on-TV, but I want more. I want more action. More demonstrations of things. More interacting with situations, people, objects. Dramatised vignettes – if not too cheesy.

I note that this is a problem that has been solved before. Enter the Open University

Open University

The Open University, for those who don’t know, offers non-residential University degrees. They were quick to embrace television as a means of delivering course lectures to supplement their mail-order offerings.

The early TV broadcasts were almost comically dull. The featured a head and shoulders shot of a lecturer talking about the subject … in … slow … measured .. tones. Sometimes, the lecturer might write on a blackboard. That was it. Students struggled to concentrate all the way through. Information content was high – but entertainment and engagement value minus several million.

Sound familiar? Preaching-on-TV.

The Open University responded to this. Their solution was to start getting visual – to adapt the lecture format to the demands of the delivery channel.

Instead of talking about projectiles following a parabola, they would go outside, build a compressed air spud cannon, fire it and then trace how the spud moved using overlaid graphics. The cannon idea is practical and fun; the graphics allow you to see what happens. Cut to some maths graphics overlays ( y = x squared and all that ) and all of a sudden you’ve taken a factual, dry subject and added a strong visual hook.

What Next?

Rob Bell and NOOMA deserve nothing but praise for doing the difficult task of ‘being the first’. But I think, as with all things, we can stand on the shoulders of this giant. More action, more drama, more visuals. Show, don’t tell. And who knows – it might be possible to take the ideas of NOOMA to a whole new level.