The Idea
About two months away from Easter we sat down as a department and looked at a few different options as our opener for Easter services. The idea that won out was a video set to the song For the Cross with the video being projected onto our worship leaders wearing white clothes. So we set out to find a way to make this happen.
Our first idea, and the one we eventually ended up using was to rent a projector, set it up by our front of house area, and aim it at a screen that set in the middle of our stage. We sent out for quotes from local production companies, and the numbers didn’t really align with our budget for our project, so we started looking into plan b’s.
There was a local theater group that had a 10k Sanyo projector they let us borrow for free, but upon testing it we discovered that two of the four bulbs were burned out. We took our chances and bought some questionable bulbs off of amazon. The two bulbs together were only $70 and it allowed us to see what this projector was capable of with all four bulbs running, but sadly one of the new bulbs blew in the first 30 minutes. So, back to the drawing board.
Testing
At this point we are a week and a half out from Easter. Milestone Church had already (very graciously I might add) sent us the video we were going to use for this element, so the only element we were lacking was the projector. We toyed with the idea of renting scaffolding and putting the band in from of our house screens, but they’re 25 foot screens and it would have dwarfed the vocalists in front of them, so we reached out to a company called Sardis Media, who agreed to bring in one of their new projectors and let us play with it one day to see if it would work.
The model we chose to start with was a Panasonic DZ13KU 12k, and we really liked how well this model worked from the start. Sardis jumped through a lot of hoops for us to make this rental work, I can’t say enough about how great they were in this project.
So at this point Easter is 4 days out, we have our projector and we are beginning the set up and testing phase. We had some old 7’ steel pipes mounted on a base that we set up to mount the screen to. The screen had a truss frame and it sat perfectly on the base of the steel pipe base, and we tied the top of it with cable tie rope. The whole design had to be built around the idea of it disappearing in two minutes after the element was done. The rope and pipe worked well for this and after placing a few sandbags it was sturdy enough to work.
Tech
We ended up deciding not use our current SDI infrastructure to run feed to the new projector, so we ended up setting up the iMac from my office up next to our front of house lighting board and run HDMI out to an SDI converter, then run SDI straight into the projector. We also used a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 interface to run audio to our audio console, with the left and right channel split for clicks and tracks, clicks just for the bands in ears then tracks for the house to blend with the band. Luckily we already had a second comm headset up there and I scheduled a second ProPresenter operator that day to run just that computer.
Once we had all this set up I set to programming the light cues that would run during the video. We have all of our cues triggered manually as opposed to midi triggers so once I was done I sat down with one of our lighting volunteers and went through all of it and we were ready to role.
Let’s Do This!
So day of all the transitions for the stage have been talked through and practiced with our stage manager and stage hands, and we are ready to role into service. Two minutes before service we start playing a two minute countdown video. The video fades to black and the band is already in place, our worship leaders walk in front of the screen dressed in all white and with white mic stands. The video starts to play and this is where it gets tricky.
Our main IMAG screens our blacked out to draw attention to the center of the room. Our lobby is set to receive the same feed as our screens, so I had to switch the lobby feed to one of our cameras so that our overflow guests in the lobby could see what is going on. We have two recording decks, one of them gets the program feed that goes to the main screens and the other records a clean feed with none of our keys in the video. I left the first deck to record program feed the whole time, but I switched clean feed to record a different camera each service so at the end of our four services we had four different looks we could piece together in post.
Everything went off flawlessly, the band sounded great, props to our audio guys, we are constantly impress with the work they do. Most everything you hear in the video is being played live, our band did amazing all four services. We had the band set to the side of the screen with bass and electric actually playing behind the screen.
So at this point the song ends, and we role into another video that plays on our main screens. We had our ProPresenter operator upstairs close the shutter on the projector as to to not be seen from this point on in the service. Our stage hands had just over three minutes of video to tear down the screen, move it behind backstage curtains (no easy task with a screen that ended up being 17’ X10’), set up the poles and sandbags back stage for the screen to mount to, tie the screen up, move bass and electric forward from where they were behind the screen, and be ready to role into worship.
During this gap I also switched all my video outputs back to clean or program feeds. It worked perfectly all four services and I couldn’t be happier. There was another break in service where a video rolled and that same stage crew had to bring out a teaching TV, table, chair, and 16’ ladder with props in less than two minutes, so it was a busy day for those guys. At the end of service we had about 15 minutes to tear down the ladder and props, reset the stage the stage with bass and electric pushed back and bring the screen back out. We had the base’s for the screen spiked and once they were in place we played the test grid from ProPresenter to do the final alignments of the screen before we tied it in place for the next service. At this point we set the center screen to our Easter logo and our regular ads on our IMAG screens and we were ready to go into the next three services.
Written by Chad Pellham (Live Video Director) of Journey Church
See It In Context
