Nature Of God Series - Part 2

New Life did their very very first sermon series called "The Nature of God" each week focused on a different aspect of God. We had a variety of speakers with different preaching styles - it was pretty cool.

I was sitting in on the initial planning meeting for the series.

I almost had a heart attack when the assistant pastor of the church looked at me during the meeting and said "so, we want to do these sermon series things, we want some cool stuff on stage to make it look different"

Which is really really cool....

I really wanted to do some cool set design stuff - the catch is that I've never had any real experience making stages look cool outside of creative stage lighting.

I did the stereotypical contemporary church thing a few times and hung some spandex sails - you can never go wrong with spandex sails. Another time I wanted an art gallery look on stage. So I asked two artists in church to let me steal their paintings and sculptures and hung large art pieces from my catwalks, smaller pieces were attached to my truss uprights, and sculptures were put on pedestools - it was a really really cool look. I of course don't have any pictures - I do have a DVD of the event - at some point I will figure out how to get some screen caps and share....

Back to the Nature of God...

I went to Home Depot and bought four 13' and two 8' sections of corregated plastic
(the stuff you make greenhouses out of) and hung them from our upstage catwalk at various heights. I programmed a few focus points where my studio colors and cyber lights would hit the plastic at different angles for different effects.

The other added bonus to doing this is that it forced us to only use one middle screen (as opposed to three) for lyrics and video rolls (we also have two other screens that just display the program feed from our TV folks)....

The result is pretty cool for $120 worth of materials. It makes our stage night church look appear totally different than our AM service... The downside is that we have to setup and teardown the plastic before/after every night church service - I am not complaining, it takes me and another guy 10 or so minutes.

I did some experiments trying to project low resolution graphics on the plastic - pretty cool. One day I will buy some more plastic and get a Matrox Triple head2go and try splaying graphics across the entire back wall.

Anywhoo... here are some pictures.

River town church - college gathering lighting

I did this show around a year ago - probably one of my slickest looking setups ever!

Front lighting was your basic 8 par tree setup (red, amber, white, blue)

Behind the band I put 4 truss uprights with a LED 64 uplighting the truss and a Colorpalette (I eventually sold) for band back lighting.

I programmed a pile of with the truss uprights one color and the palettes another color - it was pretty rad.

Boyd - their assistant pastor/environment guy snapped these pictures.

Red Look (the night before with no screen)

Pink Look:

Teal Look:

Amber Look:

Seriously - one of my favorite looking setups ever... No haze, no moving lights. Boyd was a pretty cool guy.... Not once did he ever say "Yeah we want it to look like Hillsong".

Nature of God series - Part 1

Our evening "night church" service is doing its first sermon series ever! I was asked to do some cool stage stuff for the series.

The first night was focusing on having intimacy with God. We scaled the band back some and moved them downstage for more of an unplugged worship set. For video I hung a 9 x12 rear projection screen with the projector shooting from our baptistry. To make the stage seem more "intimate" we closed our mid stage curtain flanking the screen and cut our stage in half.

I needed a cheap cool looking stage thingee that can be easily struck each week. Another churhc in town had the number 10 on their stage for their church's anniversary made out of corregated plastic lit up with some par 38's. I found the same corregated white paneling from Home Depot for $20 for a 13' section. Hung 4 of them from the catwalk and lit them up with my cheap led pars.

These pictures were taken with the sound guys IPhone....

Here is our normal setup for sunday (three screens, lots of moving lights, band very far from the front of the stage)



...and here is our unplugged "intimate" look. Less moving lights, static lyric backgrounds. Singers up front... One video screen displaying lyrics instead of two with a third screen with an iso from our center camera on who ever is preaching/singing.







The picture make the stage look really dark.... I am doing a variant to this look for the other nights of the series with a full stage. (Part 2 coming soon)

We were able to do some cool color change effects with the LED's then layered two of the cyberlights on top with static and moving breakups.

If anyone is bored and wants to add this to their stage:

$50ish dollars for the plastic
$500 for 4 LED par cans to make the plastic change colors (I already had these in my own inventory)
$100 for a basic DMX controller.
$2 for a Large Iced coffee from McDonalds for me giving you the idea.

Nathan Art

Nathan had a good time on our furniture-less back porch. He created his first chalk drawings:



The Result:



He heard something (probably a car passing or something) - the sunlight shined at the perfect spot:



We've noticed more and more that Nathan prefers doing things with this left hand... Picking up the chalk, (trying) to use forks, turning on/off light switches. Looks like he's gonna be a lefty like his dad. Welcome to never having left handed scissors in kindergarten - the special green handled ones.

Oh yeah, here is some video of Nathan dancing:



(and for the record - we cut our back lawn a few hours after this video was made)

Install Awesomeness

(this is my first time describing what I did for an install - so have mercy on my descriptive abilities)

Just got done designing/supervising the installation of new lights at Southside Assembly....

Their old setup was 12 or so pars on a Strand CD-80 dimmer pack controlled by a NSI memory console...

Overall they wanted more lights (obviously) for normal worship services and special events. The pastor wanted the ability to change the way the stage looked for each sermon series. We installed 16 Leviton LEO's for specials and a pile of pars for color washes and Altar lights.

We put LED's (Chauvet Colorado 1's) along their back wall... Those things are bright...

This is what you can do with 6 led's:







The Colorado's were so bright you can even make red (usually the dimmest LED color) show up on their black wall with full stage and house lights.



As you can see you can do a variety of looks with a few led Pars. If they wanted to - they can take the LED's off their back wall and set them on the ground accenting props, musicians, etc. We also put two of the LEO's midstage to give them the ability to throw breakups on their back wall... Each sermon series they can spend $24 to buy a new pair of gobos for their back wall. The streaks against the wall is temporary - the church is eventually going to buy some spandex and other random soft goods to vary the look up more.


Another thing we added was 6 Par's and 2 Lekos for Altar and pulpit lighting on two new electrics farther in the hosue... The pastor would walk in front of the stage and have no light on him - this would greatly upset their video guy that is trying to stream the service for the internet and DVD sales.



(I don't have a picture of this) I spec'd a Fat Frog to replace their lighting controller - they wanted a contoller that would one day control moving lights. In fact - the Fat Frog was recently discontinued - Southside has one of the last Fat Frogs ever made. Another random upgrade was putting their chandeliers on dimmers.... Instead of parking their house lights at full - they can dim them for video rolls and for worhsip... Pretty cool. We replaced the CD 80 with 36 channels of NSI dimming.

The last thing we added was a simple 4 channel DMX dimmer pack that sits on stage to control small stuff like uplights on their flags, Christmas tree lights, and the occasional 500 watt work light for Jesus' tomb during the last scene of a Passion Play.

Overall the system is pretty cool - I wanted a system that if I walked in the room to play with their lights, that I could have some fun and create a lot of really nice looks.

The church leadership is happy, I am happy.

Cool birthday (part 1)

Well, I completed my profile and even changed the color scheme after writing my first blog post.

A lot of cool stuff happened this week.

I turned 27 on Wednesday - I got the day off of work - me, Jenn, and Nathan had a busy day.

11:00 - met my mom and dad at Best buy - they bought us a cool digital camera for our combined birthdays.

(by the way - here is the first picture we took with the new camara)



(stunning)

12:30 - lunch @ Chilli's

3:00 - back at the house - took a birthday nap

3:45 - made this video BEFORE the Ultra Sound




4:00 - Ultra Sound Appointment

Nathan took a nap during the Ultra Sound:



(best screencap ever)

6:00ish - made this video AFTER the Ultra Sound




7:30 - stopped by New Life and said hi to some folks in youth at their annual bonfire

Here is me and Shuffle - my main youth tech:



Here is Adam Zink and Brandon Zink about to play some sweet Hillsong cover tunes - on a flatbed trailer with some hay - where is Darlene Zschech when you need her?



(no I didn't do the lights)

8:00 - Dinner @ Carabbas (steak with mushrooms, fettuccini, and really good sweet tea)

the company was nice too:



We were supposed to to see The Mates of State at Freebird but one of the band members (in the two piece band) was stuck at an airport so Jenn and I did what most good American's do when they get bored - went to Wal-Mart. I bought myself a new zip up hoodie ( I also call them emo-jackets) this year I got a red one! Then we went home....

All in all a great birthday.

The next day was awesome too... will talk about that later.

The First Post

So I finally decided to jump on the blog bandwagon. The wife and I got a nice camera for our birthday - so we can actually take pictures of stuff and write about it....

I am hoping to post some lighting stuff here with some pictures from my church work and freelance work.

Due to the poor economy - the freelance work has been few and far between.

Hopefuly I will remember my password and not get tired of this....

I had a few blog entries on the Myspace - nothing too cool - I complained a lot - I deleted a hand full of them.

I think I will actually stick with this if people actually read my little blog and respond - so America - its in your hands...

by the way...

these url's were already taken:
lighting.blogspot.com
thelightingguy.blogspot.com

Oh well - early bird catches the worm.