Guide for Guest Speakers
Tips for being a guest speaker at Glebe St. James
Glebe – St. James (GSJ) United Church
Guide for Guest Speakers
To understand and make the best use
of our Livestreaming System
(aka: What to do and NOT do while on our Chancel 😉)
Welcome to Glebe-St. James (GSJ)!
We are thrilled to have you as a presenter in our Sanctuary. As you are probably aware, GSJ installed a livestreaming system at the beginning of the Covid-19 Pandemic. This document is to help you make your best impression if you are going to be livestreamed using the system.
If you have any questions about this information, please contact our Co-ordinating Minister, Teresa Burnett-Cole or our Office Administrator, Jennifer Reid. Their contact information is available on our website. If you need more detailed technical information, please contact our Technology Director, Eric Dormer.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
If you have not viewed one of our Services on-line, we strongly suggest you go to our website at www.GlebeStJames.ca and click on the blue “Worship Online” button in the middle of the first page. That will take you to a listing of our services including a video archive of them. Take a few minutes to look at what our Congregation is used to seeing on our livestream feed. Select a Service and start to watch. Fast forward past the silent announcement PowerPoint slides until the Service starts (audio of voices and music). This will take you to our YouTube channel.
Things to do and not to do while speaking on our Chancel
Our aim is to make the Livestream feed as Worshipful as being in the Sanctuary in person. To that end, we follow these simple guidelines while filming the Service:
- Be yourself! Don’t change anything you would normally do while presenting and try to forget the cameras are there.
- Please don’t make any hasty moves! We use 4 cameras and “switch” between them. Please know that we don’t move the camera that is showing you to the audience. That camera is always kept still. This means that if you walk quickly, you may walk out of the field of view and we may not have another camera ready to show you as you continue to walk. If you want to walk or change positions, please tell the livestreaming team before the Service starts so we can be ready for your walk. For instance, if you would like to talk from the lectern, and then go down the stairs to the main floor, we need to know in advance.
If you wish to show a video or have slides displayed on the side walls (and shown to the Livestream audience) please let Teresa know and she will send you a template to use for the slide show. The positioning of text and graphics/pictures on the slides is important to make sure everyone can see around the large wooden beams in our Sanctuary. For slides, we use Microsoft PowerPoint on a Windows 11 laptop to project the slides, however if you can’t send us a Windows PowerPoint file, we can convert pretty much any file type you send us (PowerPoint for Mac, Google Slides, etc.) For videos, MP4 works best, but we can also convert anything you would like to send us.

Thank you!
