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.