Following almost a year of relative inactivity, sSounds is being re-launched but with a wider remit. The original purpose of creating broadcast standard music and making it available to all Christians at no charge is now being supplemented by also creating biblical stories relevant to modern life.
Prompted by the surfeit of home video style poor quality religious music videos suddenly available through streaming platforms during the Covid 19 Pandemic, sSounds was planned as an exciting free resource of new broadcast style music for churches, worship groups and individual Christians. Four songs were originally filmed before the temporary halt for Down & Out production - all with broadcast style sets, lighting, multiple locations. and even advanced computer graphics creating an unusual location that didn't exist.
Because churches were unable to hold services and groups of more than six people were banned during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, many churches uploaded complete services for their congregations to view at home. The Salvation Army corps at Southport, with which the OMF team were at the time connected, were one of those churches, uploading a virtual worship service each week to be viewed on Sunday mornings at the exact time a live service would have commenced.
Although OMF created much of that church's service content at that time, a Corps Officer (Salvation Army speak for the church minister) for some reason stated that he would never plan a meeting (service) to include any sSounds songs, preferring instead to use low quality home video standard songs downloaded from the internet and also actively blocked several young musicians from taking part. More recently, OMF research suggests that mainstream churches are actively looking for high quality service content, a requirement that Spiritual Sight & Sound is in a prime position to provide. In addition to revisiting postprod on the original four songs filmed by sSounds, behind the scenes OMF are now in conversation with church leaders to establish exactly what service content is missing, how those leaders would want such content to be used and the feasibility of producing it for them.