The Planet Wisdom tour just kicked back in full-swing in Minnesota this past weekend; and wow!  What a fun, engaging, and powerful weekend.  Mark Matlock, The Skit Guys, Dutton, and special guest Dawson McAllister were there to teach, engage, and lead worship for a couple thousand students. (Fun back story:  Dawson McAllister was the founder of this conference back in the day, before it was called Planet Wisdom.  Mark met Dawson while doing illusions for the conference, and when Dawson stepped down, Mark took over.  I remember going to the conferences when Dawson was the speaker, Mark did illusions, and MercyMe was the band.)

I have the privilege of being the lighting designer, VJ, and semi-art/cohesiveness director for the tour and just wanted to take you through my process and journey of seeing the first themed image, to final result on stage and screen.

This year’s theme is “A walk with Christ to the cross.” It’s intense. Both Mark and Dawson paint a beautifully sad and loving picture of Christ’s journey to the cross, and the Skit Guys and Dutton reinforce the message through illustrations and worship.  My kind of theme!  As always, the conference has a journal that the students get and large banners and signs that match the theme and style of the journal and vice versa.  I wanted to take that same style, and translate that to on the stage, and on the screens. We also have stage pieces this year, to illustrate each scene in the journey of Christ to the cross.  (Last Supper, Garden, Cross…)  So, I wanted to integrate those as well.

Production gear was provided by B&L Sound and Lighting. Brian, the owner, has a great heart and passion for these kind of events.  B&L is much  more than a rental house – but also invests some thought into what you actually want to see in your event.  We have a great crew this year again – David Perkins on video director, Tim Pike on main screen graphics and content creation, Cody Clements on camera, Amy Work as stage manager, and Daniel Ellis on FOH audio. – and of course our fearless conference director – Mike Work.

Here is basically the  image I first saw a few months ago:  Jonathan Matlock and Mike Ellis did a great job on this.  I don’t think I have ever met Mike, but I was told he created the look and feel for the marketing material and the journal for the tour – so mad props!!!

Grungy, organic, rough…etc.  The font that was used in print was 28 Days Later – which I thought worked well.  (Not the Planet Wisdom font.)

So, from that image, I wanted to create a backdrop and truss coverings to match the organic and textured theme.

To Home Depot we go!  Weed Block.  $13 a roll.  3′ x 36′. Perfect size to hang from the upstage truss.  It’s a little porous, but it’s lightweight and can roll up and go in a road case.

I bought some basic semi-gloss white paint and a couple of very large brooms, along with 7 rolls of Weed Block.

Laid them all out on some grass behind the production warehouse; and went to town.  Some of the frames from last year’s set pitched in to help them not blow away.  I grabbed a giant broom and a bucket of paint and started painting. After they were dry, I put grommets and tie-line on the top of each panel so they could hang easily on the truss.

Setting up the upstage truss in the MercyMe warehouse – thanks to Stephen and John for helping!

Final result on the upstage truss.  Each strip of WeedBlock gets lit from the top and bottom with LED.

They took color REALLY well – especially when both sets of LEDs are on – top and bottom.

Next, I wanted to create something to put around the 6 free-standing truss towers we have.  Last year we used them with no coverings, and put LED’s in them to color the aluminum truss.  I didn’t want to do that exact thing, so I figured we could cover the towers, and grunge up the fabric.  So I went to Walmart and bought a few Twin-sized bedsheets, and a can of cheap flat black paint; and another big broom to use as my paintbrush.  Result:

Sorry I don’t any closeups…but you can see how the LED colored the un-painted portions of the fabrics and let the black create some negative texture.  Sweet!

Ok – set pieces done; at least as done as they can be with the time allotted.  I wanted to actually cover ALL the truss – upstage and downstage – but there wasn’t time or resources to go that far, so I moved on to the next thing:  Triple screens on stage.

The only way I wanted to even ATTEMPT to do screens on stage was having the projectors on the ground and not flown, and they had to be rear-projected.  That presented a problem because normally, we would need either a really short-throw lens just for the tour ($$$) or use standard lenses and not have a back drop. The solution was the Hitachi CP-A52/100. I bought 3 of the 2000 lumen models.  They are ULTRA-short throw projectors that cost the same as a lens.  This gave us the ability to cover a 7.5′  x 10′ screen from 3 FEET AWAY.  On the ground.  It was a done deal.  Coolest thing is that now you can move your projector and screen ANYWHERE on stage you want.  It’s totally stand-alone to the rig.

Woohoo!!!

3 screens; with a full black cyc backdrop right behind it.

Next – what in the world do we put on the stage screens and main screens? Content is huge.  imago community created some great triple-wide images to use during Mark’s and Dawson’s message – each one communicated a new scene with Christ. 

I then went into Photoshop and made some simple backgrounds for the main screens for lyrics during worship.  I didn’t want to have a lot of imagery behind the worship lyrics, given the fact that we have 3 screens on stage already. I created about 6 versions, each with the white brush strokes in different places.  Looked really great and simple I think.

And that brings us to the 3 screens on stage.  I setup my MacBookPro, running ProVideoPlayer, all hooked up to a TripleHead2Go.  I created playlists for each session, but VJ-ed during the responsive worship. Shift Worship had some PERFECT imagery for this theme of “Walk with Christ to the Cross.”  Jonathan Matlock was a huge player in helping these things come together.  Check out Jonathan’s pictures of the conference HERE.  Shout out to Zach Fonville, Awake Images, Igniter Media!!!

The conference will be at Irving Bible Church in Irving, TX on Feb. 19-20th and April 23-24, and in Washington DC on March 12-13th.  It’s for students, so bring your youth group!