The largest Christian youth conference in the Midwest, Love is Red draws thousands of 17- to 29-year-olds from throughout the Great Lakes region for three days of worship, learning sessions, and music from noted Christian bands such as Elevation Worship, which recently reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts with Here As In Heaven. Contributing to the experience at the conference is an engaging lightshow that is anchored by an impressive centre stage logo display created with Nexus 4 x 4 LED panels from Chauvet Professional.
"We wanted a dynamic logo that could engage people more than something static could, which is why we wanted to do something with light," said Aaron Cole, lighting designer and director at Faith Family Church, which sponsors the Love is Red Conference. "Since the logo is essentially a heart made of 3 rectangles, the square Nexus panels were an obvious choice. I loved the idea of having the logo constructed out of something that gave us individual pixel control, and I loved the fat 8-bit style pixels. The logo we created with Nexus packs a punch and looks great as a video backdrop."
The Love is Red logo is made up 11 Nexus 4x4 panels positioned in three rows tilted at 45° angles. "We pixel blacked out some of the LEDs at the edges of the Nexus panels to get the proportions of the stylized heart logo right," said Cole, who changes the colour of the logo at different points in the conference by changing the color of light from the Nexus panels.
Cole pixels maps the Nexus panels to create varied looks during the conference. "We were able to do some fun eight-bit animation style pixel mapping of the panels just by using the 3D view on our grandMA2 console, using a mouse to physically select the ones we want, and then saving each of those selections as frames," he said. "That's how we created a very popular 60-second countdown at the start of the conference on the Nexus panels. It's also allowed us to wow the crowd by scrolling text across the panels at certain points. It was a lot of fun."
(Jim Evans)
