The filming of General Conference began humbly, with one man sitting in a hole he’d carved out beneath the Tabernacle floor.

Frank Wise was a young British convert to the Church who grew up wandering the film studios around London. When he emigrated to Utah and joined the Church in 1939, he was immediately hired by the Church to join its fledging filmmaking efforts. He worked on many films through the 1940s (including being the film editor for Johnny Lingo), but his main ambition was to record the general authorities speaking directly to the camera. He initially filmed the young apostles Mark E. Peterson and Ezra Taft Benson in a studio dressed as an office, but their delivery was so stilted that he decided to film Church leaders in their natural environment—general conference.

He was surprised to meet resistance from the general authorities themselves, who may have been camera shy while claiming that a noisy film camera in the middle of the Tabernacle pews would disrupt the meetings’ reverent atmosphere. Wise persisted, however, and when he converted the powerful J. Reuben Clark to his cause he soon gained permission.

There were numerous technical problems to overcome. First, it had been known for years that the Tabernacle was too darkly lit to properly expose film. Wise first installed spotlights from the rear, but they shown in speakers’ eyes and one general authority even paused his sermon to ask that they be turned off. So, Wise installed six fluorescent tubes directly over the pulpit, which gave enough light for good exposure but created ghastly shadows around the speakers’ eyes. To solve this, he replaced the podium’s red velvet cover with a white oil cloth, creating a reflector that bounced the light up into the speakers’ faces.

To avoid perching the camera in the middle of the room, he instead went underground, cutting a hole in the floor forty feet in front of the pulpit—on about the third row. He placed his camera in the space below and created what was essentially a periscope: a tube with a twelve-inch-square opening and a series of mirrors that bounced the image down to the camera below. This worked ingeniously, except when well-meaning but hungry worshippers mistook it for a trash bin and sent their orange peels and other garbage tumbling down into Wise’s lens. He later joked that the rubbish proved so perilous that he stopped manning the camera personally and instead built a remote-control system that allowed him to operate it from the balcony.

The remote control also allowed him to operate a second camera, which he placed in a balcony to give viewers some variety in the angles. This exacerbated a different problem, however: synchronizing the film with the audio.

Before video, image and sound were recorded separately and synchronized by the editor in postproduction. The clapper boards that snapped shut before each take provided editors with a visual and aural moment that they could place together, thus eliminating the need for trying to lip-synch the audio by eye. Wise didn’t have this luxury, so he installed a tiny light on the front of the podium that flashed in conjunction with an electronic buzz on the soundtrack; repeating this for the second camera gave him a “sync point” to align his film and his audio from both angles. “I was never more than two frames out of sync,” he later said, “which is really fantastic.” He could also save on film stock, running only one camera at a time, which allowed him to change film magazines in one camera while the other was rolling.

Wise began filming conference in 1946 and continued until 1953, when it was completely taken over by KSL Television. In later years he was bemused that his little periscope hole was now the base of KSL’s weighty hydraulic camera stand.

So, the next time you watch a conference speech on your phone, spare a thought for Frank Wise dodging orange peels and making the visual reproduction of general conference possible.