Sam Loach, son of Mike Loach, Vicar at Christ Church, Higher Bebington, helped to establish a video streaming service for the church during the pandemic lockdown. This inspired him to study film and media at Liverpool John Moore's University.
Three years later Sam has recently completed his degree course, which was largely based on a video dissertation which explored where the role of social media and film, specifically streaming, has become much more present in the church due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The mixed media project researched the roles and responsibilities that media has on the church and religion.
Sam says, " I wanted to look deeper into the effects of the role media played in recent years in keeping communities and churches alive and to see why it is still used to this day, and to research how churches had previously spread the Word of God and how this compares to modern standards, using my selected indicative bibliography to look into the changes of modern preaching and how this alteration has improved or damaged with people’s way of prayer and religion as a whole."
The film that Sam produced for his dissertation not only looks at the role of film in religion but also explores the influence it has had on people, both negative and positive.
We cannot show the film for copyright reasons but Sam's film gained him a high 2:1 which, "I’m quite chuffed with", says Sam.
Well done Sam.