First off let me say I hate to bad mouth anyone who is a volunteer. Even worse I hate to bad mouth a church volunteer. I started running church sound when I was in 4th grade. I have nothing but respect for guys who sacrifice huge amounts of personal time to make sure the choir looks and sound good on Sunday. All for no pay and little thanks. That said when you are playing with big boy toys, charging good money for tickets, and working in a mega church with a massive budget. You need to at least have some basic knowledge of how to do stuff. My wife and I went to a concert at a mega church tonight. You old timers (or those handy with search) may remember I'm exactly the biggest fan of mega churches. This church in particular has two buildings separated by 30 or 40 miles of bad traffic. I hear, the pastor preaches at one building while his wife preaches at the other one, then they trade buildings by helicopter between the first and second service every Sunday morning.
The church itself is a huge flat floored rectangular room. Reminiscent of a Vegas convention hall. It probably seats 3-4 thousand people. 30'-ish ceilings. Along one wall a stage apron sticks out. There may or may not have been anything behind what we will call the "proscenium". The stage is probably 45' wide, 25' deep and 4' off the main floor. MASSIVE FOH catwalks run the entire width of the room... must be 300'+ across for the back one. The catwalks are obscured by acoustical tile in places. The room itself sounded really nice. Someone did a great job with the placement of those acoustic tiles. There were a LOT of Source fours with Seachangers acting as the stage general wash. They had a Congo in the back. On either side of the stage there were three video screens in the 15'-20' range. Video was done on a 3 camera system one wide shot in the back at center, a big boom crane sweeping across the back, and a hand carried camera roving down front. Sound was using three large very nice concert arrays... I think Meyer. I couldn't see subs although their presence was felt. I think the speaker arrays were flown temporarily for the concert and there was actually an additional hidden house system in the catwalks. I think they put a couple of extra subs up there for the concert out of sight.
The concert was probably the biggest name in Christian music doing a very simple concert. No big touring rig, just a couple of musicians, and a mix of house and locally rented gear. I'm also pretty sure they were using the regular house technicians.
Audio:
Just barely visible on Stage Left was the monitor mix board. This was apparent as there were multiple times the lead guitarist was waving hand signals at him. The system was nice enough that the FOH sound was really nice and clean. But there were multiple times that mics were not un-muted and the artist spoke into a dead mic. There mix also seemed to vary too much. Again I hate to bad mouth a brother who is just volunteering, but it sounded like they were back there re-mixing every song as they went along. In situations like this where you don't know the band or the show and don't have a lot of time to rehearse, the most likely problem that will happen is operator error... so operate as little as possible. You do a sound check, you set levels and then you LEAVE THEM ALONE. You only do minor level tweaks when there is a solo or when the artist asks for them ahead of time. If you have time to play through the whole show and set levels for every song in sound check GREAT! You take careful notes and adjust each song TO YOUR NOTES. But, if you don't have a lot of time and you don't know the show, don't mess with it. My wife... the non-technician... was complaining the whole time about how instruments seemed to come and go from the mix for no apparent reason. As you may have read in the other forum, she has some hearing issues and she was worried the problem was her bad ears. Nope. It was the mix.
Video:
As I said before, they had three monstrous screens. One directly upstage in front of the cyc about 12' off the ground, the other two on either side of the stage. The two side screens had a great mix of camera shots. They were really well done. The main center stage screen... well... for some reason they decided it would look great with this amorphous group of squiggly lines swirling around and changing colors the whole show. I couldn't decide if it looked more like a Windows 3.1 screen saver or a multi-dimensional being from classic Star Trek. It never went away... even during BLACK OUTS! It was always there, watching, threatening to take us all into another dimension unless Scotty gets the mater/anti-mater chamber fixed in time. It would have been so much more logical to say have the wide shot on the center screen at all times while the two side screens alternated between other camera shots. Or give the same feed to all three screens. Or press the button and make the screen retract into the ceiling. But no, we looked at a slow moving color changing squiggle all night long.
Lighting:
Did you catch that line above about where the center screen was? About 6" in front of the cyc. The stage was roughly 45' wide. They had a Black traveler pulled in about 10' on each side leaving about 25' of cyc visible. In the center of this cyc there was a giant view screen with a swirly monster on it. From time to time... when the stage wasn't far too dark... we would get a glimpse of beautiful color from the Seachangers hitting the cyc. But it was hard to tell because 75% of the cyc was hidden by black curtains and a video screen.
On each side of the cyc there was about 10' of black traveler curtain. The first 5' or so of this at the extreme edges of the stage was unlit. The second 5' or so of this black curtain was illuminated with an LED strip light pointed upward. There were no cyc lights on the little bit of cyc that was visible. YEP, they were using LED's to light a BLACK curtain. Red looked okay. But the rest of the time it just looked muddy. Meanwhile, only inches behind this black curtain was a beautiful cyc begging to perform for those LED's. If you don't have an amazing backdrop, either close the curtains and play in front of a black background OR open them up wide and light your cyc with color. Lighting a black curtain just doesn't work. If you've got dozens of Seachangers washing the stage in color, you don't even have to try, the cyc will look okay from the spill. If you've got some LED's you can use to up light it as well, it'll look spectacular.
They had 6 moving head wash lights and 8 moving head spot's. Judging from the weird mounting of the on stage fixtures I'm guessing they were rentals just for this show. I think the wash lights were VL 500's I couldn't see the spots. Above the stage there were two or three catwalks. Located at a nice convenient working height of 30" or so above the deck of the catwalk was a batten that the Wash lights were mounted on. This was clearly convenient and easy to hang, but it means that much of the fixture's path of movement is obscured by catwalk. They need to hang down below the catwalk so that when they move, they don't suddenly disappear! A truss hanging down a few feet would be perfect. Throughout the show when they would get the fixtures moving they would be illuminating each other and the rest of the catwalks! If you are going to use movers, hang them in a place that they can actually make use of the fact that they move!
Speaking of moving... they moved fairly often in the concert... unfortunately the programmer apparently only figured out how to program two moves. Sometimes they simply moved back and forth left to right without changing tilt at all. Other times they performed a sort of out of control figure eight pattern that quickly got annoying when the pattern was repeating over and over. That was it. Every time a fast song started we either saw the figure eight or the side to side pan. Over and OVER and OVER... Kids. If you are going to rent moving lights, take the time to program them. It quickly moves from cool to annoying and distracting. My wife (not a technician) said afterward all she could think when a new song started was which pattern will the lights move to this time. If you don't have the time, rent a bunch of colored pars and do some classic flash and trash on the fly. Save your money, the audience will be far less annoyed at you.
Speaking of classic Rock and Roll lighting. The basic principle is lots of colored light from above, sides and behind. Then hit the artist with a follow spot from the front. Nothing fancy but it's worked for as long as rock and roll has existed. If however you keep all your down and side lighting turned way down and you don't turn on a follow spot, you have a dark stage. This happened a lot. There were at least two complete songs with no follow spot. There were times that the only front light was coming from gobos in the movers... which were a darker color. This only counts as an effect if you do it once or twice for just a moment. If you do it all the time, it's just dark. If the stage is really dark... you've got radio. New designers out there, I don't care how cool your look is, we need to be able to see the talent's face. It's scientifically proven that our ability to understand what someone is saying relies heavily on being able to see their lips move. If you are making the whole show up as you go along record a LOT of different looks and be sure they all have proper light to see faces. Then you won't have a problem.
Ignoring the clashing color combination choices I'll skip ahead to one more annoyance... gobos. They used the same star shaped gobo for the first 75% of the concert. Then for about 10 minutes we kept seeing what appeared to be a could animation wheel slowly swirling. Finally we saw a different gobo... accompanied by a previously unseen movement pattern right at the end of the show. We never saw a gobo rotate, never saw two gobos in use at the same time in the same fixture, and the gobos were always in sharp focus. People if you are going to use gobos, learn to use them well. In the wrong hands they can be repetitive and annoying (Why are there always stars on the stage? This show is really patriotic). It's rare that a gobo is used in perfect focus (unless being used to establish a realistic element). You often want to pair them up and make even make them spin so you get changing looks. Movement is interesting! The same thing over and over... not so interesting.
My wife, the non-technician, found the show so poorly executed it was distracting her from enjoying the music. Me I wanted to go in the back and take over. I'm still frustrated hours later. They had so much nice gear and obviously a huge budget. But their fundamentals are so poor.
Which brings me to the educational point of this post. Even the best gear can't overcome bad fundamentals. There are a lot of people out there in really lame low budget high school, churches, and community theater facilities. Yeah it's frustrating trying to do theater on no budget. But the key is fundamentals. So what if you only have 12 lights. Can the audience see the actors? Make the most of what you have. It's easy to get distracted and wallow in self pity because your theater can't afford GrandMA and a dozen MAC 2k's. The good designer learns to make the most of what he/she has in stock. A bad designer has thousands of dollars of toys at his/her disposal and can't keep the stage properly lit. Learn the difference. Learn the fundamentals. Focus on what you can do now. Go ask people in the audience for their honest reaction to your work.
Finally if you are a House of Worship technician (or you know one), stick around CB, ask questions, let us help you. You are doing good work without a lot of help. Let us be your tech support.
Wow. That looks like a classic Ship post.
The church itself is a huge flat floored rectangular room. Reminiscent of a Vegas convention hall. It probably seats 3-4 thousand people. 30'-ish ceilings. Along one wall a stage apron sticks out. There may or may not have been anything behind what we will call the "proscenium". The stage is probably 45' wide, 25' deep and 4' off the main floor. MASSIVE FOH catwalks run the entire width of the room... must be 300'+ across for the back one. The catwalks are obscured by acoustical tile in places. The room itself sounded really nice. Someone did a great job with the placement of those acoustic tiles. There were a LOT of Source fours with Seachangers acting as the stage general wash. They had a Congo in the back. On either side of the stage there were three video screens in the 15'-20' range. Video was done on a 3 camera system one wide shot in the back at center, a big boom crane sweeping across the back, and a hand carried camera roving down front. Sound was using three large very nice concert arrays... I think Meyer. I couldn't see subs although their presence was felt. I think the speaker arrays were flown temporarily for the concert and there was actually an additional hidden house system in the catwalks. I think they put a couple of extra subs up there for the concert out of sight.
The concert was probably the biggest name in Christian music doing a very simple concert. No big touring rig, just a couple of musicians, and a mix of house and locally rented gear. I'm also pretty sure they were using the regular house technicians.
Audio:
Just barely visible on Stage Left was the monitor mix board. This was apparent as there were multiple times the lead guitarist was waving hand signals at him. The system was nice enough that the FOH sound was really nice and clean. But there were multiple times that mics were not un-muted and the artist spoke into a dead mic. There mix also seemed to vary too much. Again I hate to bad mouth a brother who is just volunteering, but it sounded like they were back there re-mixing every song as they went along. In situations like this where you don't know the band or the show and don't have a lot of time to rehearse, the most likely problem that will happen is operator error... so operate as little as possible. You do a sound check, you set levels and then you LEAVE THEM ALONE. You only do minor level tweaks when there is a solo or when the artist asks for them ahead of time. If you have time to play through the whole show and set levels for every song in sound check GREAT! You take careful notes and adjust each song TO YOUR NOTES. But, if you don't have a lot of time and you don't know the show, don't mess with it. My wife... the non-technician... was complaining the whole time about how instruments seemed to come and go from the mix for no apparent reason. As you may have read in the other forum, she has some hearing issues and she was worried the problem was her bad ears. Nope. It was the mix.
Video:
As I said before, they had three monstrous screens. One directly upstage in front of the cyc about 12' off the ground, the other two on either side of the stage. The two side screens had a great mix of camera shots. They were really well done. The main center stage screen... well... for some reason they decided it would look great with this amorphous group of squiggly lines swirling around and changing colors the whole show. I couldn't decide if it looked more like a Windows 3.1 screen saver or a multi-dimensional being from classic Star Trek. It never went away... even during BLACK OUTS! It was always there, watching, threatening to take us all into another dimension unless Scotty gets the mater/anti-mater chamber fixed in time. It would have been so much more logical to say have the wide shot on the center screen at all times while the two side screens alternated between other camera shots. Or give the same feed to all three screens. Or press the button and make the screen retract into the ceiling. But no, we looked at a slow moving color changing squiggle all night long.
Lighting:
Did you catch that line above about where the center screen was? About 6" in front of the cyc. The stage was roughly 45' wide. They had a Black traveler pulled in about 10' on each side leaving about 25' of cyc visible. In the center of this cyc there was a giant view screen with a swirly monster on it. From time to time... when the stage wasn't far too dark... we would get a glimpse of beautiful color from the Seachangers hitting the cyc. But it was hard to tell because 75% of the cyc was hidden by black curtains and a video screen.
On each side of the cyc there was about 10' of black traveler curtain. The first 5' or so of this at the extreme edges of the stage was unlit. The second 5' or so of this black curtain was illuminated with an LED strip light pointed upward. There were no cyc lights on the little bit of cyc that was visible. YEP, they were using LED's to light a BLACK curtain. Red looked okay. But the rest of the time it just looked muddy. Meanwhile, only inches behind this black curtain was a beautiful cyc begging to perform for those LED's. If you don't have an amazing backdrop, either close the curtains and play in front of a black background OR open them up wide and light your cyc with color. Lighting a black curtain just doesn't work. If you've got dozens of Seachangers washing the stage in color, you don't even have to try, the cyc will look okay from the spill. If you've got some LED's you can use to up light it as well, it'll look spectacular.
They had 6 moving head wash lights and 8 moving head spot's. Judging from the weird mounting of the on stage fixtures I'm guessing they were rentals just for this show. I think the wash lights were VL 500's I couldn't see the spots. Above the stage there were two or three catwalks. Located at a nice convenient working height of 30" or so above the deck of the catwalk was a batten that the Wash lights were mounted on. This was clearly convenient and easy to hang, but it means that much of the fixture's path of movement is obscured by catwalk. They need to hang down below the catwalk so that when they move, they don't suddenly disappear! A truss hanging down a few feet would be perfect. Throughout the show when they would get the fixtures moving they would be illuminating each other and the rest of the catwalks! If you are going to use movers, hang them in a place that they can actually make use of the fact that they move!
Speaking of moving... they moved fairly often in the concert... unfortunately the programmer apparently only figured out how to program two moves. Sometimes they simply moved back and forth left to right without changing tilt at all. Other times they performed a sort of out of control figure eight pattern that quickly got annoying when the pattern was repeating over and over. That was it. Every time a fast song started we either saw the figure eight or the side to side pan. Over and OVER and OVER... Kids. If you are going to rent moving lights, take the time to program them. It quickly moves from cool to annoying and distracting. My wife (not a technician) said afterward all she could think when a new song started was which pattern will the lights move to this time. If you don't have the time, rent a bunch of colored pars and do some classic flash and trash on the fly. Save your money, the audience will be far less annoyed at you.
Speaking of classic Rock and Roll lighting. The basic principle is lots of colored light from above, sides and behind. Then hit the artist with a follow spot from the front. Nothing fancy but it's worked for as long as rock and roll has existed. If however you keep all your down and side lighting turned way down and you don't turn on a follow spot, you have a dark stage. This happened a lot. There were at least two complete songs with no follow spot. There were times that the only front light was coming from gobos in the movers... which were a darker color. This only counts as an effect if you do it once or twice for just a moment. If you do it all the time, it's just dark. If the stage is really dark... you've got radio. New designers out there, I don't care how cool your look is, we need to be able to see the talent's face. It's scientifically proven that our ability to understand what someone is saying relies heavily on being able to see their lips move. If you are making the whole show up as you go along record a LOT of different looks and be sure they all have proper light to see faces. Then you won't have a problem.
Ignoring the clashing color combination choices I'll skip ahead to one more annoyance... gobos. They used the same star shaped gobo for the first 75% of the concert. Then for about 10 minutes we kept seeing what appeared to be a could animation wheel slowly swirling. Finally we saw a different gobo... accompanied by a previously unseen movement pattern right at the end of the show. We never saw a gobo rotate, never saw two gobos in use at the same time in the same fixture, and the gobos were always in sharp focus. People if you are going to use gobos, learn to use them well. In the wrong hands they can be repetitive and annoying (Why are there always stars on the stage? This show is really patriotic). It's rare that a gobo is used in perfect focus (unless being used to establish a realistic element). You often want to pair them up and make even make them spin so you get changing looks. Movement is interesting! The same thing over and over... not so interesting.
My wife, the non-technician, found the show so poorly executed it was distracting her from enjoying the music. Me I wanted to go in the back and take over. I'm still frustrated hours later. They had so much nice gear and obviously a huge budget. But their fundamentals are so poor.
Which brings me to the educational point of this post. Even the best gear can't overcome bad fundamentals. There are a lot of people out there in really lame low budget high school, churches, and community theater facilities. Yeah it's frustrating trying to do theater on no budget. But the key is fundamentals. So what if you only have 12 lights. Can the audience see the actors? Make the most of what you have. It's easy to get distracted and wallow in self pity because your theater can't afford GrandMA and a dozen MAC 2k's. The good designer learns to make the most of what he/she has in stock. A bad designer has thousands of dollars of toys at his/her disposal and can't keep the stage properly lit. Learn the difference. Learn the fundamentals. Focus on what you can do now. Go ask people in the audience for their honest reaction to your work.
Finally if you are a House of Worship technician (or you know one), stick around CB, ask questions, let us help you. You are doing good work without a lot of help. Let us be your tech support.
Wow. That looks like a classic Ship post.
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