by Marian Sandberg | livedesignonline | Jul 29, 2014
Courtesy of Sagebrush Community Church
Sagebrush Community Church of Albuquerque, New Mexico, was always going to expand beyond its original four walls at its Riverside Plaza location. At only eight years old, the church already had plans in place for the multi-building campus to be built in three phases. “The newest worship center was the third phase,” says Moses Almanza, the facility’s lighting designer and programmer, who started as a volunteer and worked his way up to a fulltime gig at the church. “The first phase was around 2006, and the second phase added a worship center that’s now a multipurpose building, as well as an education center.”
Outfitted with lighting, video, and audio by Stephen (Baine) MacArthur and his team at Vast Technologies, the latest addition is a 2,000+ seat worship center with increased video capabilities. “At the new worship center, we wanted to expand the video elements instead of projecting them in a static rectangle,” says MacArthur, who has also worked on the ministry’s mobile campuses and did the main design and layout for the new center. “We wanted to move those elements about the set and stage, envisioning new set designs.”
Sagebrush uses quite a lot of video in services and performances, so when the new phase was started, they took advantage of the timing to upgrade the system, including a state-of-the-art production control room, new projectors installed by Advanced Presentation Systems, and two 10’x5′ screens comprising 100 Elation Professional EPV762 LED 7.62mm pixel pitch video panels, 50 panels each side, as well as an Elation EPV Image VSC video processor. Two rear-projection screens and a front projection screen add layers of video to the stage. The positioning allows content to be viewed from a wide angle since the seating is shell style. Video of the services can be captured, edited, and rebroadcast at the mobile Sagebrush locations, and podcasts are posted online for download.
Courtesy of Sagebrush Community Church
“In the current configuration, [the panels] are hung in two sets of 50 panels that can merge as one to become as large as the entire width of the stage,” MacArthur says. “The viewing angle in the facility is extremely wide, and because of that, the 100 panels give us enough space coverage at the back of the band performance area to be adequately seen from all seats in the congregation.” Marc Campanozzi is the facility’s production director.
“The Elation panels have made our job easier for the production team because as a light source, they’re very brilliant and the colors are amazing,” Almanza says. “Because we were new to LED panels, we weren’t quite sure what to expect. When they first turned them on, just the brilliance of the color and what we were able to do with them was amazing. They are powerful enough to overcome any of the lighting setups we put up and make it visually more aesthetic. It allows us to take our video productions to a whole other level.”
“The Elation panels have made our job easier for the production team because as a light source, they’re very brilliant and the colors are amazing,” Almanza says. “Because we were new to LED panels, we weren’t quite sure what to expect. When they first turned them on, just the brilliance of the color and what we were able to do with them was amazing. They are powerful enough to overcome any of the lighting setups we put up and make it visually more aesthetic. It allows us to take our video productions to a whole other level.”
Courtesy of Sagebrush Community Church
Almanza only started to learn about lighting design and programming while volunteering six years ago, so he had to really step up his game when the call came for a permanent position three years later. “I was basically just the board op on Sundays,” he says. “This has really been on-the-job training.” The team at Vast led the project and the design, working closely with Almanza so he could perfect his newly found craft. “Steve wanted to know the ideas and concerns I had based on what I had discovered on the first building,” adds Almanza. “But he really worked with the shape of the building, the acoustics, and the architect on the final design.”
In the old facility, power distribution was an issue for Almanza. “There would be certain areas where we wanted to put a light, light a position, or separate a light out, and the initial design, while very good, just didn’t work well all the time. Some things were hard-wired together, so if I plugged in to a particular electrical outlet, sometimes it was tied to another outlet. Basically if I tried to isolate a light, it was difficult to do, and there weren’t enough electrical drops for the number of lights I wanted to use.”
In addition, the older facility was a two-universe system with many fixtures daisy-chained together, so Almanza requested a layout that’s easier to troubleshoot. “It worked out well, because we’re using a ChamSys MagicQ M300 board for the lighting, and it comes with 64 universes. Since our system was being setup on a network, it makes it very easy to access all the universes now. Of course it’s laid out in a grid, but it’s also laid out in sections, so I have one universe for one catwalk, one for another, etcetera, so if I’m having an issue with a particular fixture, I know what universe to go to in order to start troubleshooting.”
Courtesy of Sagebrush Community Church
The lighting rig features predominantly Elation Professional fixtures—Platinum Spot 15R Pros, Platinum Spot 5R Pros, Platinum Beam 5Rs, Platinum Wash ZFX Pros, and TVL 3000 II warm white units—as well as Philips Strand SPX ellipsoidals, and Wybron Cygnus LED units, both RGB and white versions. An Elation EW-DMX-T wireless DMX transmitter and two receivers, as well as MDG Atmosphere 5000 hazers and TMB DMX-controlled fans, round out the system. Dimming is via a 196-channel Strand C21 system.
The moving lights are mounted in the FOH catwalks, on upstage and downstage pipe-grids, as well as onstage and on multiple ground-supported towers and props. “We use 13 universes of Philips Strand ShowNet to convert to DMX,” says Almanza. “It has nodes, and because it’s a networked system, it’s all based on IP addresses, so I can take one of those nodes, put in anywhere I want, and plug into it, and now I have DMX access, a universe, wherever I need it. It’s a very flexible system and works really nicely.” The Platinum ZFX LED fixtures’ built-in wireless DMX transmitters and receivers are used for ground-supported lighting, while the TVL 3000s work as footlights for the pastor for services and video capture. A Philips Strand VisionNet system manages the architectural lighting in the venue.
The SPX ellipsoidal works well, Almanza says, especially because of its rotating barrel. “Sometimes when you adjust the shutter, depending on where it’s angled, it’s not in the best position, but I can rotate the barrel so I have another level of adjustment I can make. They also have a locking shutter feature, which is really nice. I used to spend a lot of time adjusting shutters in the other building.”
Courtesy of Sagebrush Community Church
In order to keep the backstage area as open as possible to be able to move props around, but having to consider enclosing the rear-projection setup to keep light out, Vast designed a large cantilever base that comes off the floor and incorporates the use of soft goods rather than a solid enclosure. “We can actually fold it up, pull the curtains back on it, move stuff in, and then drop it back down,” says Almanza. “We also have several moving heads hanging off the catwalk, and Vast designed a rigging device where we can pull a pin, undo a bolt, and slide the head up to work on it instead of trying to work on it while hanging off the catwalk or over the rail.”
And what worship center would be complete without lasers? The in-house X-Laser high-power unit is a full animation laser that, MacArthur says, “fits in a rigged position directly between the two LED walls and looks like it’s not there. It’s sitting in the dark against a masked backdrop, so you can suddenly see lasers look like they explode from the video wall.”