Mod Scenes

FULL DISCALIMER!!!:  I really hesitated to post this blog post. I want to share my heart and how God has been moving in it the past few months. A big part of that is the creation of Mod Scenes. If you are reading this and it feels at all like a sales post, please just jump right past this post. My heart is to serve the kingdom of God and below is how I've been moved to do that recently.

This past year has been a bit nuts. I have kept feeling God calling me to expand my reach outside of my home church, Journeychurch.tv. I love my church and felt like God was calling me to stay though.

I pretty much chalked this up to me being a crazy person... until God gave me the inspiration for Modscenes.com

In my time over the summer I had been chatting with a great mentor of mine and trying to figure out how to share the skills God had given me with more people. From our chats and my love for lighting, I landed on a plan to create custom lights for churches. I'm glad God didn't let me stop there though, he had much better plans.

Through a crazy good opportunity to design a huge scenic set, I ran into the need for a bunch of modular scenic panels. I found that Atomic Design was really the only game in town. They make some of the most amazing products you will ever see.  That being said their panels didn't quite meet the needs of our design, so I decided to try and make some modular panels myself. Through the process of designing and later CNC cutting these panels for my client, I realized that this could change the way churches do stage scenic. I could help churches to create great environments for a fraction of the time, and with a small investment.  

 Many churches (especially larger ones) have a  person (or a few people) on staff that have taken ownership of visual design and many of them have done some great things. In the past few years since Churchstagedesignideas.com launched, people's talent and creativity has blossomed so extraordinarily. These people can create from nothing and it is so amazing and energizing to see! However, being in their shoes, I know the sacrifice it takes to pour mounds of hours into creating something, only to have to re-create it over and over again in order to refine it to a point it can be usable. My hope is that Mod Scenes can fill a gap and allow for more time margin for these visual artists. Cutting the set build time to a few minutes per panel and a few hours for a full backdrop; can allow more time to focus on lighting, interact with volunteers, or spend some well deserved time with family.

Another exciting prospect of these panels is that they can be custom cut with the CNC. Want to cover the stage in snow flakes, crosses, or that amazing texture from the Rosco frozen rain gobo? With a little setup time most anything is possible! The flexibility this creates is so awesome. Add to that using a colored piece of coroplast and printing on top of the panels and you can easily see another million possibilities

Where I think this really shines though, is in small to medium sized churches. Many small churches still lack the resources to create a beautiful stage design. Most of the time, i've found that time and workload is the most scarce resource. Mod Scenes makes it a step easy by simplifying the needs of tools, time, and labor enabling a worship pastor and a few members of the band to setup their entire stage in an hour or two. The stock panel designs are designed so that no matter the orientation they create a dynamic backdrop. This makes it easy to setup, even for someone who is not skilled in visual design. Lighting is also simple, a few up lights and they look like gold! (picture below)  (That pun was so very intended... I may have wrote this entire post to use this pun...)

In all seriousness, I am super stoked to see how this is going to help the church create environments for worship. Our generation is one that highly values visual art and this is just one more avenue to engage people so that the local church can share the gospel. I cant wait to use them and see them used for God's glory!

Christmas Spectacular 2014

Christmas every year at Journey is special.  I feel like Journey has an cool energy, but Christmas Spectacular is always way over the top awesome.  It always rivals some of the greatest commercially produce Christmas events.

Our outdoor lighting, lobby, and kids rooms atmospheres were outstanding and immersive as you can see below.

Our kids fun rooms featured: Elsa and Oalf from frozen, Foam Snow Balls fights, RC monster trucks, a model train, and lots of lights!

For the purposes of this blog though, we will focus on the production (cause honestly lighting is the coolest thing ever).

In previous years we've split our budget with half of it going to rentals and the other half going to purchases (normally some leds that would later be used in a kids room, or a couple additional movers).  This year we basically dedicated our entire budget to rental.

A big part of Christmas Spectacular is the lighting.  We as a church love light!  For our lighting package we rented 24 Elation Platinum Beam 5rs.  We rented them to get a good punchy beam that was able to be prism-ed out for an awesome crisp beam patterns.

We wanted to bring some new technology to our congregation that would help us create quite a few very specific content pieces.  We chose to go with LED panels to minimize our build time and eliminate concerns of lighting spill.

With our complex schedule in December we had to have a 2 phase load-in.  We struck our Fall set and installed lighting on December 1st and installed the LED panels on December 8th.

For our opening number, we built a small thrust out into the room.  Trent, Allison, Chance, and
Logan played an acoustic version of Joyful Joyful from this center of room position.

This song morphed in a U2ish feel after a short interlude that featured a scripture.

About two minutes later, a DJ stand rolled out and the song broke into a EDM type feel.  

We used 52 Color Kinetic I cove LEDs attached to some plywood to create the facade for the DJ riser.

After a short welcome we then went into a rendition of Run Run Rudolph.  It was quite cool.  Inside our media server we built some masks that "blacked out" some of the LED scenic panels.  Using a few of these masks in a chase, we created a sequence where the led panels flashed on / off with the tempo of the song.

One of my favorite parts of this year's Christmas Spectacular was a video and music piece based off of nostalgic video games.  It was outstanding.  The video content was so amazingly over the top.  To this day it is still one of my favorite projects to be a part of.  Marty Taylor killed it!

Below are  more of our great program photos and some photos from the setup.  Hopefully I will be able to get a video up, as it does it a lot more justice.