We did it in the 100′x100′ open room; rigged a bunch of lighting and audio – 24 VL2500, 6 Cyberlight turbos, 8 Design Washes; 80 LED fixtures; 90 or so ETC Pars.  The show was in the round with multi-level staging.  Pretty awesome for a high school!

My former youth pastor, Scott Werntz directed the show again; which wasn’t complete without a live camel.  The cast and crew of around 300 did FANTASTIC!  I’m proud to have been able to do this for them. It really IS all about relationships; and the ones I have with the people at that school make this one of my favorite events ever.

One special highlight for me was being to fabricate my LED light-up coat I’ve always wanted to build for this show.  With the help of Meg Hinkley (costume designer) and Brian Barth (Solder rock star) I was able to get it done!  Remote controlled; battery-operated; and just AWESOME.  Check out the ending sequence below for the result.

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat – LED Coat from Camron Ware on Vimeo.

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!

I thought it would be helpful to share what colors I use the most in worship lighting, and WHY.  Just as with imagery, I let the song/scripture/worship element drive where I go visually, but sometimes the lighting color needs to be the starting point , and the imagery can fit into that color.   I generally use 1, 2, or 3 similar colors; or a slight variant of one color.

If I can only have one lighting color (besides and no-color front light/specials) I generally like to use blue.  I figure, if there is no-color front light, I can dim that down for my warm looks, and the blue for my cool looks.  Next color I want to add is red.  After that, amber…

My take on worship lighting colors; and what mood they portray:

Red - Communion, death, blood, sacred, sadness.  Good Friday service.

Blue - calm, peace, serenity.  Typical for sky or night…

Amber/CTO – candle, warm, intimacy.  Lots of response songs.

Yellow - happy, joy, loud.   Easter service.

Purple/Magenta – royalty, majestic, color of Advent.  (Dark purple – Lent)

White - cleansed.  I like to pair red with pure white to communicate how we have been cleansed by the blood of Christ during certain worship elements.

I don’t use Green in worship.  To me, it comes across as weird, alien, money, and not fitting in worship songs necessarily.  If I’m doing green nature imagery, I go with amber lighting.

Yes, green can mean growth/life/renewal, but that’s just my opinion.  I never understand when I see Red and Green lighting used in worship at the same time.  They mean two completely separate moods.  Life and death.  Looks great on a Christmas card, and has powerful meaning (Christ’ life and death, brings us life…FROM death) but to me that doesn’t really translate to lighting to me.

What is your take on worship lighting colors?

For three of those weeks I will be on Jekyll Island, Georgia; where during the day I’ll hang out on the beach reading Using Visual Aids in a Church, published 1949. Myself along with Stephen Proctor (www.worshipVJ.com) will be blogging about the book as we go through it.

There is an amazing team  army at Faith Christian School in Grapevine that is putting on Seussical this week in the school’s new creative arts center.  I love this job!  Such a blessing…

Alford Media is supplying all the production gear (audio and lighting), 26 movers, plenty of conventionals.  ZFX is flying a few of the 85-member cast.  Bleachers to hold 600 people were built from scratch.  There are sets pieces almost two stories tall.  Whew.

Scott Werntz is doing an incredible job of directing the students and the crew on bringing his vision to life.  Seussical is based on the story of Horton the elephant, who hears the Whos on a tiny speck of dust, not able to see them, but still having faith in them and helping them save their world.  Scott has done an amazing job of tying this story together with the story of Christ and His love for us.

I’ll be doing the same thing the next two nights, on the front of First Baptist Church of Coppell, TX.  Stop on by…we had about 20 people brave the cold wind and come out to see it the first night, just hearing about it from Twitter, including a couple of good friends from Fellowship Church in Grapevine.

It was quite a visual treat!  I think we almost caused a few wrecks on the main road leading into Coppell as well.  Oops.

Will someone please get the media on this to show everyone how cool it is?!  I mean it’s on First Baptist Church…You see it in Vegas…Europe…blah blah…but I don’t this see ANYWHERE in North Texas, especially not on a church building.  It has so much potential and beauty…

A lot of these pics show Awake Images; if you haven’t seen their content…go check it out.

HD video of night #1 coming soon…

And for those of you wondering the setup…3000 lumens, PVP, TH2GO, lots of VGA.

More pics here.

This was my fourth production with these kids; and they are just a blast.  A few guys from the Dallas Summer Musicals showed up one night and were blown away.  Such a fun group of kids! 

Lighting the show was one of the most fun and interesting yet.  There were 9 windows plus a door that all needed to be lit individually, and isolated from the rest of the set.  Given the angles and line of sight for the audience, this meant getting creative as to where to put the fixtures.  Some of the lights were right above the audience’s heads.  Yikes.

We ended up have (8), 8-foot truss towers around the room, each with a Mac 550 moving light.  On the stage, 16 Coemar PARLite LEDs for color candy.  Add in about 24 Source Four ellipsoidals, and we’ve got a pretty sweet show for the room size. 

Oh, and a Hog 3.