Church Lights!: Christmas Spectacular 2013

Christmas at Journey is Crazy Awesome!

Looking back on it, I am outstandingly grateful that our leadership has trusted us with the resources to make OUTSTANDING environments. This year's Christmas Spectacular was themed "In the light"

Our congregation and guests were welcomed with one of the largest Christmas Light displays in Norman (I can only find a few larger displays in Oklahoma).

This alone could be a blog in it's self. As you can see we completely covered our building in LED Christmas lights. We used over 800 strands (800,000) lights to light the building and foliage. We spent 2 weeks installing rigging for all the Christmas lights (many nights in the dark with 20mph winds). Patrick and Jason were troupers and did a great deal of the hard work putting in steel cable around the building for the lights to attach to, most at night after class. As a matter of fact, they did pretty much all the work after I managed to break my finger.

Once the rigging was in place Matt Carter (one of our congregants, who owns a landscaping company) and his team installed the leds. The LEDs turned our building into an amazing glowing orb. It was sweet and a huge win for the church and promoting our Christmas events.

Outside we also had sleigh rides and a fire pit (with smores of course)

In the lobby we had tons to do as well

There was a 14' tall Ginger bread house; kids play area with monster trucks, trains, crafts, cookie decorating, and games; tons of great food and drinks; log cabin play place; photo booths and awesome decor.

Although our team had a hand in a lot of the outdoor and lobby stuff, there were a ton of other people who were far more instrumental in making this space awesome! Let me assure you it set a tone of excitement throughout the entire weekend.

Our production teams main focus during Christmas was the atmosphere in our main auditorium. We wanted to create a bright vibrant atmosphere that changed and was flexible for the many different styles of music and worship we had during the service. We wanted to create something that had lots of impact but kept our rental and scenic budget reasonably low. We also wanted to keep in mind that our theme was "In the Light".

We landed on a set that was composed of columns of Austrian drapes, towers with Mac 101s, set carts with changing scenery, a cool line of upstage colorblasts, and a new lighting layout.

We decided we liked the elegant look of austrian Curtains. After some pricing and assessing options, we realized sewn Austrians were significantly out of our price range. Marty had a great idea though that made it possible with a bit of trial and error.

Our plan was to buy 2 rolls of Silver Allegro Silk fabric and bunch them up to create ripples like an austrian. After a TON of trial and error we found that if we folded our fabric back on itself 1' that it would make great folds that weren't too deep but still had some body. We made these 1' folds every 4' to get the most even spacing possible.

We used Rose Brand Holdon clips to fasten the fabric together at our folds. This clip also acted as our attachment point to the vertical rigging pipes that held our 101s. We knew to get an even look we would have to have vertical pipes between each section to support the curtains.

We used zip ties to attach our curtains and clips to the vertical pipes

As you can see, we had 4 sections of drape upstage and 2 sections downstage that acted as wings. Once the curtains were hung, we used 6 Martin Stagebars to light them.

For lighting, we spaced out our Mac 101s, along with the few we rented in a 7 x 3 grid with a few extras on the floor. The large amount of fixtures with a narrow beam made for great effects, beams, and back lights.

Above the curtains and 101s we hung a long row of Colorblast 12 TRXs. We used all the fixtures we own and evenly spaced them out (about 1' between each light). My goal with this was to have some back light that I could rely on if I was using my Mac 101s as high aerials or to light the curtains, but I found that the CB12s made for a great visual element too!

The most challenging part of this set though, was all the changes during the show. We had 6 stagehands changing over elements during most of the service.

Video of Service:
Video of Christmas Spectacular 2013

Below is a bit on the specific creative elements we included in Christmas Spectacular and how our awesome stage team helped to pull it off.

Opening:

We opened the service with a video with scripture from Isaiah 9 which reads "The people in darkness have seen a Great Light..." The video continues telling of our great savior who has been born to be the savior of the world. Immediately out of this Trent began to sing the Intro to "There is A Light"

As the song built in culminated in a huge sea of light as Trent sang "Light of the World

Seamlessly the band transitioned into "Do You Hear what I Hear". I used this song to show off the wonderful depth of the fabric and lit it with texture from our Mac 700s.

Next, Pastor Clark welcomed our church family via video. During this transition or stage team rolled into place 3 scenic carts. The carts each had 4 Christmasy looking trees that were made of 1/2" expanded plastic that we got (and had cut via their CNC machine) from our local sign company.

Also, you might notice we had a tiny bit of snow

Next, a Audition tape intro-ed one of the coolest pieces I have ever seen a church do. A Christmas 80's piece. At this point hopefully you have broke down and watched the video. :-) This audition tape gave us a clear time for our stage crew to move of the 3 tree carts and replace them with 2 carts that were covered in individually controlled blinder lamps that looked like an EQ. We used 2x4s for framing and controlled the blinders with our Christmas light dimmers.

Our amazing worship team changed a ton of 80s songs into Christmas songs and JESUS WAS PRAISED! It was stellar. Austin played the Keytar and Trey had a drum machine on a marching carrier (with EL wire of course)

We also rented X laser, laser nodes that were controlled from our lighting console.

Under the cover of our offering setup, our awesome stage team pulled off the blinder panels.

One of our awesome interns, Zac, performed a spoken word next. We used a single par 46 on a floor stand that was placed and removed during the spoken word as the front light.

Next, our worship team played one of their original songs from the 2013 Christmas album, Emmanuel. It is a stellar song that speaks of how Jesus came as the light of the world. (notice a theme?)