Chauvet strikes colour for Night of Worship spectacle

USA:

Elevation Church’s mammoth Night of Worship featured a lighting design by the church’s broadcast designer, Matt Hemmele, comprising Chauvet Professional Color STRIKE M fixtures, supplied by Main Light. Hemmele’s design employed a “no videowall” policy and instead he relied on the fixtures alone to generate visual energy for the broadcast recording and engage the 2,000-strong live crowd.

Held at the sanctuary’s Ballantyne, North Carolina campus, Hemmele lit the entire two-hour recording almost exclusively with the Chauvet luminaires, with just a small number of linear LED units behind the scrim. “We wanted a clean upstage look, which to us meant no videowall,” explained Hemmele. “But we still need to display song lyrics, so we rented a 35k projector for that purpose. This preserved our clean looks.”

Eighty-three Color STRIKE M units were deployed, with 56 positioned in the overhead rig, nine placed down-stage for crowd lighting, six on the mid-house truss to deliver fill light for the stage and crowd, and a further 12 on the deck to illuminate the scrim. To allow Hemmele to run more fixtures per circuit, all the Color STRIKE Ms were run at 208V.

“We used 46 of them as the main top key and relied on them to provide dynamics while on the front and back tips of each truss,” added Hemmele. “We also had them work as a crowd blinder and upstage fill for the white scrim.”

Hemmele said that whenever he uses the Strikes, he breaks them down into three groups: strobe, colour and main. “I used the strobe as our home base for brightness and colour, then used the colour attribute to add both warm and cool tints as well as more granular dimmer effects as I ran the main grid in 74-channel mode,” he explained. “I then used the main as overall brightness, accent hits and larger-scale dimmer effects. With each truss having between 8–10 strikes on them, I essentially had a large-scale PXL curve that built some ‘curve’ position presets to create some interesting texture to the grid.”

As the Night of Worship recording was for an album, Hemmele placed an emphasis on crowd lighting to ensure the audience was clearly visible for the camera. “Having the strobe and colour plate in one fixture is an incredible asset,” concluded Hemmele. “The insane brightness that they both have creates really high dynamics and it allows me to layer on accent hits and sweeps that really punch through. The tilt is an added dynamic that really put these over the edge in helping create interesting looks that didn’t grow stale throughout the night.”