I figured I would share a video from church with the small portion of the internet world that visits here. This is a testimony intro video we played in church on our opening weekend in the new building. I edited it in Adobe After Effects with the chair being hand drawn, scanned & cut in Adobe Illustrator before I imported it to be ‘drawn’ in the video. Our new projection system is widescreen, that is why the video looks cut off on the top and bottom. YouTube automatically letterboxes it. Also, there is no sound. Fred, our worship director, played piano live during the video.
The point of the video I think is pretty self-explanatory when you see it. It set up David Wilkin’s testimony pretty well. Even though there is not much to it, it turned out to be super-effective.
I feel like I can breathe again. I actually got home during daylight hours yesterday for the first time in probably a month. I sat at home, almost restless, because I have grown accustomed to having a ton of things to do all with the same deadline. Praise-alujah that the deadline has passed and I met the deadline on all but one thing that I can recall. I didn’t have my distributed video working properly. Our camera in service for some reason only wanted to show green on the TVs elsewhere in the building. At 10:45 pm on Saturday night I gave up temporarily. I had already fallen asleep sitting in three different places in the building and realized that I didn’t have it in me to do any more. I needed rest to return somewhat refreshed at 7 am the next day.
I must publicly thank Jerry Davidson and Richard Taylor, two awesome volunteers, for their over-the-top efforts that helped me get everything done. Jerry was everywhere I needed him with regards to getting the sound system up and running and Richard was all over our new lighting system among other things. God always seems to provide the right people for the jobs.
As many of my coworkers have already published (Chris, Fred, Shannon), our first weekend in our new facility went off wonderfully. God showed up in many ways. David preached a message about the bottom line of our church, “never be the same again.” Our desire as a church is to see Christ impact people in life-changing ways. It was awesome to see him do that yesterday. People hit the altar after both of our services, something they have hardly been able to do for a couple years now because our chairs were all the way TO the altar. We are super-grateful for the tool God has blessed us with. Now we need him to bless us with a parking miracle. Come Lord Jesus, and bring parking spaces. We had around 1600 adults in our two services, around 200 middle school students in RushHour and somewhere around a billion little kids in Tiny Town, FamJam and KidJam. It is kind of a scary feeling to open your new facility that was built FOR GROWTH and have most of its resources packed out the first week. I am sure that numbers will drop some after the curiosity wears off, but still, WOW.
Well, since this blog is supposed to be technical, I should say something technical. Our main service went off almost without a glitch at all. The only issues I faced yesterday were wireless mic signals dropping out a bit. Just a growing pain/learning curve. We had 8 vocal mics, 3 speaker mics, 1 guitar and 11 in-ear monitors all on Sennheiser wireless systems in the main room. In children it was 8 speaker mics, in youth it was 3 vocal mics and 2 in-ears. Needless to say, there is going to have to be more frequency coordination. Worship in the main service turned out great. It was awesome to be in the back and see so many people engaging the Lord like that. The music is coming across full and clear, two things I am thankful for. Our engineer from Baker Audio spent a few hours Saturday night tweaking the room system after our first worship service in there Friday night. He was able to finally hear some tings I had been hearing after his last visit and get them cleared up.
So we are one week away from “launching” our new facility. We will have a worship service for our body next Friday night, the 29th, and then our first services in our new home on Sunday the 2nd. On my end of things we have been working with mainly 2 companies, Baker Audio (who also is doing our video systems) and Mainstage Theatrical Supply. I was reading through our bid package with Baker to check and see if we had in fact gotten everything we paid for. I stumbled across an astonishing number (besides the price). In our facility in just the A/V systems (not power or house/theatrical lighting) we have run approximately 40,500 feet of cable. This is made up of speaker cable (Speak-on for the nerds out there), Cat5e network cable, and mostly mic cable. There is 7.56 MILES of signal cable in the floor of our three main rooms. Holy cow. Like I said, does anyone have money invested in copper?
We have had two rehearsals now in the new sanctuary and a partial rehearsal in our children’s ministry’s Clubhouse Theater. Rehearsals in the youth’s Rooftop will ramp up next week. I have to say I am pleased with the outcome. We have three very clear and clean sounding rooms. Two of them are very tight acoustically with almost no natural reverberation and one room definitely has some reverb but nothing abnormal or unfavorable. I posted a while back about getting our new soundboard in hand for training purposes and how much of a difference it had made acoustically the moment we plugged it in. Well, we hadn’t seen anything yet. When we patched into our Meyer line arrays, subs and front fills it was a beautiful thing. Once again we were hearing things that we hadn’t heard before with the same people and instruments passing through. (I want to stress that while I AM an audiophile and LOVE great sound, that is not the drive of these systems. It is our desire to create a space where the Word of God and the Worship of God can go forth clearly and warmly. We want to make people long to come back again to worship Him.)
We also have gone to wireless in-ear monitoring systems for up to 11 people on stage. We have 8 transmitters and 11 receivers. Our plan for now is to have vocalists share mixes. It DID seem like a little bit better plan that it actually is but it still works well. We have one male and one female vocalist sharing a mix with the vocals panned left and right in their ears. I thought this would be a perfect solution but it seems when your voice is in your head and your ears are plugged at -26 dB, you tend to hear the OTHER voice in your ears more than your own. I am confident with some level and balance adjustments we can make nice though. The HUGE plus of the in-ears far out weighs those hiccups though. We are able to get very clean & crisp mixes because there is very low stage volume with no monitor wedges firing at any of our sources. Also, the stage doesn’t look like a disorganized warehouse with boxes strewn about everywhere.
One other big factor in our clean sound is the drum shield we built. I got an idea for it at another church and did some research myself. I’ll post on it separately later because I really think it will be helpful to other churches and theaters trying to control stage volume and not look wrapped in plastic.
Well, thats all for now, kind of a tech update on the new facility for the four of you that care (my parents, my in-laws). Actually, I don’t think they care THAT much, its more of, hey, where have you been the past 3 months and what have you been doing… update.
