New beginnings lead to a colourful Easter
Published: WORSHIP
USA: The Heights Baptist Church took the meaning of Easter as a time for new beginnings to heart this year with the installation of a new lighting rig. This provided the church with new colour rendering options ahead of its Easter service and sermon.
‘Our church had a very beautiful video created for its traditional and contemporary services,’ reports Bobby Dennis, Heights Baptist’s technical director. ‘The video featured a father and son talking about the colours they encounter on a daily basis and how they relate to the message of Easter, with red for the cross and white for the resurrection and things of that nature.’
It was the key role that colours had to play in the church’s Easter service that led to the decision to upgrade the lighting rig. ‘We had a good system in place,’ recalls Mr Dennis. ‘However, with Easter approaching, we felt that we should replace our old scrollers with high performing LED fixtures that could saturate our stage with rich colours. This was a move we were going to make anyway, but Easter definitely served as a catalyst. It was the perfect time for us to have a fresh, new start with colour.’
In the weeks leading up to Easter, Heights Baptist acquired just shy of 40 LED fixtures from Chauvet Professional. These comprised 14 Colorado Batten 72 Tour fixtures, six Colordash Par-Quad 18s and six Colorado 1-Quad Zoom Tours.
‘Colour has always been important to lighting services, especially when you have a large stage and worship area as we do,’ says Mr Dennis. ‘With the additions we made for Easter – now a permanent part of our lighting palette – we’re able to offer more vivid colour saturation and definitely more flexibility in colour options than we could with the previous conventional scrollers.’
Mr Dennis filled the stage with colour during the Easter service by mounting the Colorado Battens on vertical pipes to produce a light bar effect during particular scenes. ‘We created very deep looks with them at different points, then during the singing of actual worship songs we ran these at only two per cent because they are so bright,’ he says, while noting that they were turned up to complement the video presentation.
The Colordash Par-Quad 18 fixtures were mounted above the stage for general washing, while the Colorado 1-Quad Zoom Tours were equipped above each of the main ‘leader’ positions. These were zoomed in close during songs and used as washes during the colours video presentation.
Continuing to make use of its existing fixtures, Heights Baptist used its roster of Rogue RH1 Hybrids to project textured gobo patterns onto the stage backdrop. ‘There was quite a bit of extra work that went into making our Easter services more memorable,’ concludes Mr Dennis. ‘Easter may be over, but we still have our new colour rendering fixtures, so we’ll be able to create many more special looks throughout the year.’