'One powerful message': What it takes to broadcast, publish general conference

SALT LAKE CITY — General conference is the biggest event of the year for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and putting it on every six months is a monumental effort that takes thousands of people to accomplish.

General conference is held twice a year, on the first weekend of April and the first weekend of October. Leaders and general authorities from the Church of Jesus Christ give speeches in five separate sessions at the Conference Center in Salt Lake City.

Accommodating the approximately 100,000 visitors to the Conference Center and broadcasting the event live in 80 languages worldwide is no easy feat. Thousands of employees and volunteers are needed on various teams to ensure the conference is executed successfully.

General conference

Sessions Saturday and Sunday

Sessions of general conference will be held Saturday, Oct. 4 — at 10 a.m., 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. — and Sunday, Oct. 5, at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. You can stream general conference live on KSL.com, where reporters will also be live-blogging summaries of each speaker's talk.

In March, the church released the first three "Behind the Scenes of General Conference" videos highlighting a few of the countless tasks that go into producing the worldwide conference.

The March videos feature the staging crew, which moves and assembles the general conference stage over three weeks; guest services missionaries, who usher 20,000 guests in and out of the conference center each session; and the interpretation department, which consists of 57 language interpretation teams in Salt Lake City and 143 teams worldwide.

"By highlighting individual and personal stories, the series seeks to demonstrate the colossal efforts, volume and large numbers needed to execute each conference," the church said.

In preparation for the 195th Semiannual General Conference this weekend, two new videos from the "Behind the Scenes of General Conference" series dive into the efforts of the broadcast and magazine teams.

The broadcast videos detail the "highly coordinated, tested and rehearsed" production elements of conference. Teamwork and communication are vital to making the process run smoothly, broadcast producer Alan Rast says.

Rast said he meets with the church leaders prior to each conference to discuss how the broadcast team can best support them in presenting their talks. One of his favorite parts of his job is getting to hear the leaders' talks weeks before conference and feel their testimonies as they speak.

From rehearsing with each speaker and checking audio levels, to wrapping cables and coordinating camera angles and lighting, or even just setting up chairs, each role on the team is crucial, Rast said.

Paul Miller, director of broadcast and events, said general conference is "an opportunity for all of our Heavenly Father's children to … see and understand the gospel." He said there are "redundancies" built into the system, so that if one thing goes down, the broadcast won't be interrupted.

"We're just nothing but instruments in the Lord's hand," Miller said. "There are no small roles, because every person has a unique role to play and that all contributes to the greater whole so this goes out as one powerful message to the world."

Miller said his team's goal is to get the messages out in a timely fashion, "close to 100% as possible." To do so, the team starts working to prepare for the next conference just three weeks after the current one concludes.

"It's because we love the Lord and we want to make his message shine so that people can focus on what the message is and what is being delivered," said broadcast production coordinator Jackson Holmes.

The magazine team has the massive task of creating and publishing a general conference issue in just days.

"Each conference issue is twice as big as a regular issue, and yet we're putting it together in a fraction of the time," said copy editor Garry Garff. "It's a small miracle that we get that out."

Regular issues of the church magazines take up to 10 months to complete, from the writing, editing, design, translation, printing and publishing. All content undergoes three edits before being placed on the pages, accompanied by pictures and graphics to enhance the messages.

"At the end of the day, people might not know everything that went into the magazines," Garff said. "What is most important is that the spirit of the Lord is in it, and that's our goal."

The magazine team has photographers in 30 different countries, giving the magazine plenty of opportunity to showcase church members from all across the world.

The new behind-the-scenes video also depicts the sophisticated printing and binding process that turns paper into a freshly finished magazine.

David Dickson, the managing editor of For the Strength of Youth magazine, says he always feels a sense of reverence and awe knowing he gets to take general conference messages and put them in a format that can be distributed all around the world.

Sessions of the church's next general conference will be held Saturday, Oct. 4 — at 10 a.m., 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. — and Sunday, Oct. 5, at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. You can stream general conference live on KSL.com, where reporters will also be live-blogging summaries of each speaker's talk.

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