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.

MCKBD 2014

The 2014 installment of My Church is Kinda a Big Deal features lots of change.

We went through 3 completely different set designs before we landed on one 4 day before the install.

The first

We planned to purchase 80 mega lights to build this awesome structure, but due to shipping costs, financial delays, and timing we had to scrap this idea 3 weeks out.

The second

Twelve days out we ordered and received 30 Colordo 3Ps from a dealer online.  Once we received them, we found most units did not have proper hardware and multiple units were not functional.  So, obviously we were not willing to pay for full price for the issues with these lights.  Thus the sale fell through and we were left with 4 days to figure out a set.

The third and final

Here is what we finally landed on.  We kept the vertical pipe layout from our second set and added a few elements.  One of the coolest, and hardest parts of this set is random layout.  Anyone that knows me knows, I am super OCD.  I typically touch every piece on a Catan board (nobody likes to put things in the exact center of the hexes.....)  Most every set I build is symmetrical.  Not only does it make for expansive beautiful looks, but it also makes programming easier.  I have found that I have grown a ton getting out of my comfort zone with this set that is so far from symmetrical.  Rest assured however the past 3 sets following were symmetrical within a very small margin of error.

On to building this set.  We purchased all our pipe for this set (1.5" rigid steel conduit) from Home Depot.  Although we had to paint it, it was easily worth it since they cut and threaded all of the pipe for free.  We used an oil based paint (flat black) so that the paint would bond with the pipe.  We had a bunch of our outstanding volunteers jump in last minute to help.

We used grid lock pipe clamps to hold all of our pipes to our grid.  We planned to use double cheese borough but had to go with grid locks due to budget.  At the bottom / top of each pipe we had a Mac 101 wash (also some with 301s).  We made some interesting clamps form 3/8 bolts, uni strut parts, and C clamps to allow us to attach the lights at the very end of the pipe.

Behind our grid of random pipes and 101s, we hung a Aluminum screening drop.

In addition to the drop and flown pipes we made a ton of pipe base plates out of 3/4" plywood, 2x4s, and pipe flanges.  Since we only had a few pounds per pipe these worked great.  Obviously not for holding up a ton of lights, but good for our short term purpose.  We also added a bunch of our Colorblast TRXs as back lights to our lower pipes for some more visual interest and back light.

All in all, a somewhat simple set but great considering the four day timeline.