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.