Every year Journey Church puts together a Christmas show to reach out to the community. It is really something new, that I have never seen in a church. This year we themed our celebration as Vintage Christmas. The feel started outside the building with Christmas lights, a bonfire, and Christmas music. One of the coolest things outside (my wife's favorite part) was the Horse drawn carriage rides that went around the church. There were also some S'more roasting and outdoor games.
Inside the lobby was crazy! Rod Conant came up with an awesome plan. In the center of the lobby was a giant wreath flown above everyone.
Our team used our 24' circle truss and covered it with black fabric, garland, and Christmas lights. A few large ornaments and BANG it looked awesome! As you can see from this point the crew fanned out Festoon lights to give a nice warm glow.
Journey on a normal basis provides free coffee and sodas for service. For Christmas it is overboard! There was free Hot Cocoa, Sodas, Coffee, Cookies (like 12 types!), candy, snacks, S'mores, popcorn, and other sweets galore. Everyone's inner fat kid was certainly tested.=) I think these simple (and relatively inexpensive) comforts are an awesome way to make people who don't like church feel comfortable. I love that we do this!
Some of the other cool things for kids in the lobby included a Log cabin playland, a train set, racing monster trucks, cookie decorating, and Lincoln log building.
So, my part of this extravaganza came down to the Auditorium and the Atmosphere in the room. We wanted to create a vintage look and Marty Taylor provided an awesome concept.
Marty had the idea of creating a proscenium out of red velour fabric like an old proscenium theater. Along these lines we decided to hang lots of older style conventional fixtures as scenic. We rented a bunch of scoops, fresnels, lekos, and beam projectors. Company De Roth rented vintage lights to us for $40 a piece for the entire month long run of this set. This coupled with our small inventory of Pars, scoops and fresnels helped us to create an awesome stage design. We focused most of our vintage fixtures out across the audience. We also made sure to never dim our vintage fixtures above 30%. Our goal was to have a warm glow, not blinders.
We rented the Red Damask curtains from Grosh rentals. The fabric cost us about $750 a week to rent.
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We also lit our back curtain with Colorblasts, so that we could try to match the Red look of the Damask drape. It worked rather well and I was even asked multiple times how we hung red drape over our black back curtain.
One of the funniest things we got to do for this set was, lighting lights. We found that our vintage fixture glow looked cool, but you couldn't tell how old the fixtures really were. Just to give you an idea of how old the fixtures were, some of our stage pin connectors didn't have a ground (see picture). Also if Keigel lighting rings a bell that is the type of fixtures we are talking about. We ended up down lighting most of our Vintage fixtures with Par 46s to help them stick out. It was quite a funny process.
We mixed in our moving lights with the set and conventionals and were able to create some pretty awesome looks. We hung our Mac 101s with some Unistrut brackets on top of pipes. It worked very well and allowed us to have the fixtures oriented with the "lense straight out". Putting moving fixtures on this axis makes pan sine waves have a slight swing up and down to them, which can work really well.
So to help tell our story I am going to go through how we told the story of Christ through our production. Since I am not always the best with words, feel free to watch the video of Christmas Spectacular at the bottom of this post.
The experience opened with a video of children telling the Advent Story. Following this element was one of my favorite songs, O Come Let Us Adore Him. Our worship team did some really cool things with this. They used some 55 Gal drums, drums made out of paint cans, and other really cool percussion to give the song a really cool feel. And of course, we put colorblasts in the drums.
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Next we did Rocking Around the Christmas Tree. Thirty dancers joined us for this number they were all over the place!
Our next element was my favorite! We had three ballarenias dance a 60 second segment of Dance of the Sugarplumb. Near the 60 second mark, they got interrupted by a Dubstep drop down! Then 3 of the coolest dancers (Remote Kontrol) I have ever seen appeared from offstage marching like Nutcraker soldiers. The got to center stage and amazed everyone with thier rubber like dance moves. Seriously you should watch the video, it is nuts. So to fit the continuing Dubstep music during their performance I did some crazy lighting. Huge Ballys, Strobes, and Chases. More than once I had to pinch myself to make sure I was not dreaming.
Video of the Madness: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=LO2KVzL6gNg
Next we did a Video narrative that concluded with Wexford Carol. During Wexford Carol, a video depicting the Christmas story with Cardboard style cut outs depicted the Christmas Story. Tyrus and April did an awesome job. It was a stellar video.
Then Pastor Clark gave a message about moments and how our moments meeting Christ can change our lives.
We followed the by singing O Holy Night.
Then the worship team played O Come Let Us Adore Him
Then we concluded the worship segment with a huge celebratory version of Joy to the World. We used the David Crowder Version with the awesome synth lines. We brought our hardware store percussion back out for this. It was all kinds of sweet. The pictures don't do justice to how worshipful and awesome it was.
Lastly as a fun ending elementwas that four of our worship team members lip-sang Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays as The J Boys (think Nsync-ish). It was funny and we got to douse the stage with snow. Fun times were had by all.
So to get to the point of the final product was quite the process. As opposed to telling all about the details I have included below some of the paperwork that shows our plans and how we were able to accomplish our plans. And as promised at the bottom is a link to the video of the full service.
Stageing Plots
