Woman's conference set

(first post in 100 years)

So, I wanted to break away from the "three screens of death" video look
for a while on the big stage for this woman's conference at the nlcf
and make the stage look a bit more girly.

We first raised the center screen. Then took 30ish strands of
Christmas lights in hung them in three groups coming down the
catwalk. After that tedious process was over, we hung some sheer
fabric on front of the lights. The effect looked great.

The next thing we did was reset our projectors and screens to a 16:9
ratio. We did this to be able to hang lanterns under the screens and
so we didn't have this giant awkward square where the center screen
should go.

The set looked great. The funny thing about switching the screens to
a more wide screen look made the stage appear newer. It's funny how
we are programmed to think that rectangles are more futuristic and
hip than squares.

The plan was to keep this look through the Sunday after the conference.
Well, we went to power our center projector back up and imagine our
surprise whe. The stupid thing wouldn't start up. One of the fans
stopped working so it told the projector not to turn on. So we sent
the projector off to Sanyo. We kept our woman's conference look up for
2 more weeks.

A few pictures:

Zephaniah Tabernacle Concert

Another awesome gig.

Zephaniah Tabernacle (I had to google it to get the spelling correct) is a church in Springfield about a mile from the house Jenn and I used to live in on Laura Street....

This was their first "worship concert" with their new band/praise team and a live recording. We setup the night before at midnight, right after tearing down from youthquake the night before.

Before:



After:



Before:



After:



All in all it was a good show.

The majority of the effect lighting came from 4 10' truss uprights with a Trackspot and a pair of LED 64's mounted on top. 8 Pars on a pair of tripods provided basic front light.

The back truss lights were ran by Chamsys on Andrew's laptop. I am still amazed at what you can do with the software and a USB>DMX box.



Here is a video of the band (and conregation) having a party between songs:




More pictures can be found on the good ole photobucket There were three cameras shooting the event for a promo video, when I get the DVD (and figure out how to rip DVD's) I will post the video for my MANY readers.



This is one of the ONLY shows in 10 years of lighting at various churches where the pastors invited me to come pray with the band back stage



I found this door sign - maybe I'll add "minister of education" to my resume and enclose this picture to prove it:


Believe it or not, I saw my second gold church chair less than 24 hours after seeing the first one at Paxon

Youthquake Live @ Paxon Revival Center Church

Paxon is a 5000 seat church with metal halide gym lights for house lights. I really didn't want to use their house lights so we put 8 cans on tripods in the balcony with red/orange gel for house ligthts. It was a little dark but it was much better than the alternative.

Andrew actually ran lights from his laptop on stage... This was the largest event Andrew had to program for.



I basically ran the church's installed lights off a cool older NSI controller


Before:



After:




Before:



After:



To make the room "seem" smaller I suggested putting something cool in the back to distract from the under balcony area that seated 800 people. I borrowed some spandex thingees from Chets Creek and lit them with some led pars. One random thing that came to mind was lining the path under the balcony with Christmas lights - it turned out pretty cool.



3000 kids showed up.

YQL did communion for the first time. It was an event that I was really glad to be part of.

River Town Church Portable rig

River Town is a church plant that (like most church plants) has to setup and teardown every week.... They wanted a cool lighting system that would give them lots of different looks and is configurable for different sermon series.

Here is the concept:
The system is designed around 4 12' tripod stands placed on each corner of the stage.

>The 2 "front light" tripods had 2 LED 64's, 2 Shorty Par 64's with 500 watt wide lamps, and a dimmer pack per tree (for white light, we also used shorty pars so that the would have the same dimensions as the par 64 leds - so we can put them in a case easily).

>The two back trees had 4 LED 64's each.

>I also had them buy 4 more led 64's on mic stand bases for wall streaks against their back wall or for random lights on the floor (like putting them behind the drum set, etc)

The pars were pre rigged on the par bars and pre wired with power strips and DMX cables. They also designed some pretty slick cases for the 4 par bars.

To make the setup go even faster... We took dmx cables and loomed them to extension cords with friction tape giving you one cable per tree. We purchased a DMX splitter so that you don't have to daisy chain all the trees together...

Sunday morning rolls around:
1 - Roll in cases, place tripods
2 - Place par bars on tripods
3 - Plug in DMX splitter and power strip (near the splitter in a little roadcase with the splitter)
4 - Distribute power and dmx via the 50' power/dmx looms (just like you would run your mic/instrument cables to your snake box on stage)
5 - Lay out uplight pars, daisey chain dmx and power to uplights.
6 - Run the 150' DMX home run (we put it on a reel to make it easier to roll up and not knot up)
7 - Hook up DMX controller (we used a DMX operator - works great)
8 - Test lights
9 - Raise stands
10 - Program lights (if needed)

Its a cool system for around $3000 (16 leds, 4 64's, dmx splitter, controller, tripods, cabling)

We also designed it to be useful if permanently mounted when they actually get a venue..... The dimmer packs are 4 channels, so all they have to do is add 4 pars or lekos for white light and they still have 16 LED pars for front color, back light, side light, etc.

Here is some pics I took from their site:

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.