Texas church revitalised with Chauvet
- Details
The new 1,200-seat church was scheduled to host services for the first time on Easter Sunday, 2020, but fate intervened once again in the form of the coronavirus. With the lockdown in effect, the church couldn’t reopen on schedule and had to limit itself to online streamed services. Almost two months later, however, with restrictions on public gatherings eased, the church was able to welcome limited groups of worshippers to its new sanctuary, following social distance guidelines.
Although many of its members continued to worship online, those in attendance got to experience first hand the immersive environment that United City’s technical director Chad Kirchoff and his team envisioned when they began working with Stark Raving Solutions on the new lighting system.
“The church wanted a completely fresh start in terms of the environment created in the sanctuary,” says Marcus Hammond, of Stark Raving Solutions. “They wanted a really modern lighting package - lots of color, movers and flexibility, so that’s what our team, led by Bret Hoskins, lead system designer for the UCC project, and Jason Lericos, SRS project manager, were able to provide them.”
To maximize the flexibility of the new system the rigging above the stage was designed to allow the church’s team to orient fixtures in multiple directions using them for aerial effects and audience lighting. Nearly all fixtures in the rig offer full colour mixing, since the ability to immerse by changing hues was extremely important the church.
“United City’s team was determined to get an extremely contemporary rig with lots of flexibility,” said Hammond. “They wanted the ability to say ‘yes, we can do that,’ when any idea came up in a creative meeting. The entire system is based around DMX network protocol (sACN) with distribution all over the room.”
A collection of 24 Rogue R2x Wash fixtures spread out over an entire overhead grid and strategically positioned on the stage deck, are key to helping the church achieve the desired effect. “With so many Rogue fixtures it is easy for the church to get the range of looks it wants,” says Hammond. “We also used 10 Maverick MK2 Spots to create depth and texture on the stage.
For added colour, the rig has two COLORado Solo Batten fixtures as well as eight COLORdash Batten Q12 and 18 COLORdash Par Hex12 IP units. Most of these fixtures are run on network distribution.
(Jim Evans)
