Significant milestones deserve memorable celebrations. For most organizations, a rented ballroom or restaurant space is sufficient. The game changes when the organization is among the nation’s largest and well-known mega churches. In the case of the South Barrington, IL-based Willow Creek Community Church, its 40th anniversary celebration called for a much larger space — Chicago’s 20,000 capacity United Center arena. The goal was to deliver the same immersive visual experience that congregants had come to expect from the church’s worship services.
An Immersive Extension
“Willow Creek has a long history of using cutting-edge technology to support our pastors and artists as they serve and lead,” said Darren Niesley, video director for live events at Willow Creek Community Church.
In fact, Willow Creek recently upgraded its South Barrington campus to a full HD video infrastructure for worship service and special event production, complementing its impressive lighting and networked audio systems.
For the United Center celebration, Niesley and the greater Willow Creek team worked with an array of production professionals to amplify the South Barrington experience for an in-the-round arena-sized spectacle.
Fusion Productions, responsible for bringing creativity and technology together across all live production arms, was the first stop for Willow Creek.
“Our task was to take the creative ideas of Willow Creek and turn them into a full production across lighting, staging, video and audio,” said Todd Elliott, owner of Fusion Productions. “My immediate thought: Who do I know and what companies do I trust to pull off Willow Creek’s vision for the event? This was a big job with challenging timelines. There was no room for error.”
A Tight Turnaround
The Willow Creek 40th Anniversary took place on a Sunday, but being Chicago’s primary arena, the United Center had a Saturday night event. That timeline made Nic Dugger of TNDV Elliott’s first call, based on their history of working together with Willow Creek on their annual Leadership Summit event; and the Nashville-based mobile production company’s experience on a similar stadium-sized 2013 Atlanta worship event.
“The United Center didn’t allow us access to the venue until midnight for a 5 p.m. Sunday start,” said Dugger. “That’s an extremely tight timeline for load-in and setup alone, not to mention testing and commissioning the various systems.”
TNDV, along with other Nashville-based companies Morris and Accurate Staging (and Chicago-based sound companies VER and TC Furlong) headed to Chicago several days prior for a thorough dry run at Northern Illinois University’s Convocation Center. While the 10,000-seat basketball arena wasn’t a perfect replication, it allowed the production team to nail down the stage design, technical infrastructure, onsite crewing and in-venue communications plan.
“The ceiling was quite a bit lower, and a scoreboard at center arena made the configuration far from in-the-round,” said Elliott. “However, this prepared us well for the short load-in time, and Willow Creek rehearsed the program with the production teams to work out all the kinks. That made for a seamless transition to the United Center, making it well worth the time and expense.”
After two full days and nights of rehearsal, the various arms broke down and headed an hour down the road to set up the event.
All The World’s a Stage
Willow Creek had no problem filling the arena, inviting current and former congregants from around the world to join members of the leadership. The event program balanced dynamic speakers with high-energy musical performances from Willow Creek’s speaking and worship teams.
Elliott put a tremendous amount of thought into stage design to accommodate the variety of talent, and tasked Accurate Staging with bringing that vision to life.
“There is nowhere to hide anything when you are performing to audiences at 360 degrees,” said Eric Cardswell, project manager, Accurate Staging. “As we were in and out within 24 hours, we had to be very creative in our approach to executing Todd’s vision for the stage.”
Cardswell and his team found a comfortable space away from rigging — a massive undertaking itself, managed by Reed Rigging — to assemble the stage before rolling it into position. The 40-foot circular main stage was heavily reinforced to support a second 20-foot round. The design additionally included longitudinal stage thrusts at the north, south, east and west positions, with LED tape wrapping all stage levels to highlight the edges.
“The LED tape added another dimension for the lighting director, empowering him to add context to the performances,” said Cardswell. “The staging design with the four thrusts also ensured the lighting team could take some more artistic liberties with schemes and patterns. Lighting was often concentrated on one of the four thrusts, making it the primary direct address stage while the other three were lit more artistically. The thrusts also proved valuable for transitions, highlighting the north and south ends while preparations for the next act happened on the east and west sides.”
The lighting infrastructure provided by Morris included Vari*Lite VL3500 Wash fixtures to provide overall wash coverage for the stage and Martin MAC Auras for the dasher wall and general wash effects over the audience. Additionally, Mythos lighting supported the beam fixtures, highlighting specific parts of the stage and providing gobo effects; while VL4000s provided key lighting.
“The VL4Ks were very significant to the overall lighting environment for this event, as the designer, Daniel Connell, very specifically wanted a high output fixture with framing shutters to hit certain positions on the stage during talking moments,” said Morris account manager David Graham. “Daniel’s strategy also ensured he had enough foot candles of key light for the broadcast cameras, the originating point of the images seen inside the United Center and on the web.”
A Visual Event
TNDV strategized the end-to-end video infrastructure to support in-venue LED screens, a live broadcast stream and an ingest feed to recording systems. Whereas TNDV typically operates the equipment for its clients, Willow Creek’s gifted technical crew manned the controls across most of the video operation. This included seven Hitachi HD1000 cameras positioned around the venue.
“Our job was to make sure everything was properly installed, calibrated and tested, and ensure everyone was comfortable in their roles once inside the venue,” said Dugger. “The guys at Willow Creek are experts in broadcast and production, so it’s expected that we provide top-of-the-line facilities similar to what they have in their church.”
TNDV brought its 40-foot Elevation truck to the event, equipped with a Ross Vision 3 switcher to produce and manage the various live feeds. The Willow Creek team produced a line cut for the webcast, streamed directly from Elevation’s on-board servers, along with a raw feed to Elevation’s bank of Aja KiPro recorders.
Inside the venue, Willow Creek took great care to enhance its story and history through engaging visuals. The Willow Creek team served dynamic graphics mixed with live video as new talent took the stage. Renewed Vision’s ProPresenter 6 media presentation systems were used to trigger graphics across four Winvision LED screens, each specified to 14.5 by 25.5 feet and delivering a resolution of 512 by 896 pixels.
“All media playback content was delivered to us in a finished capacity,” said Dugger. “Graphics were loaded into ProPresenter, and we simply made sure everything played out as expected. It was a rare treat to not worry about building graphics and creating content on site. They knew exactly how they wanted it to look.”
As Willow Creek’s lead video director, Niesley worked very closely with the TNDV team throughout the event. He credited TNDV’s technology choices as instrumental to the overall quality and success of the video elements.
“ProPresenter has a very intuitive interface that makes it a breeze to use in live events,” said Niesley. “We used two ProPresenter 6 systems: a primary system for keyed graphics and lyric presentation, and a backup system for redundancy that was also occasionally used to support additional graphics. These mixed with live video from the seven Hitachi cameras, three Panasonic HE120 robotic pan/tilt/zoom cameras and Mira Abekas playback systems.”
Though Willow Creek is a mega church, there were budgetary concerns for the equipment infrastructure. One way to address this was a reduction in camera count, which was a tricky proposition given the in-the-round configuration.
“I am aware of several productions that used three to four times the number of cameras to adequately cover an in-the-round event,” said Niesley. “The Hitachi HD1000 cameras are very high-end, and they performed reliably with excellent image quality. Adding three perfectly calibrated robotic cameras enabled us to capture more content, and the additional angles really enhanced the experience. Often with inexpensive POV cameras, we set them up but do not use them because the quality difference is striking. For this event, I had no problem cutting the POV camera feeds in with the Hitachi feeds.”
Lines of Communication
The production crew on board Elevation communicated with front of house and camera operators over a multichannel RTS ADAM intercom matrix. TNDV additionally deployed a multichannel routing architecture with local multiviewers so operators could monitor camera feeds from various locations. A quick push of an intercom panel button enabled immediate communication with the truck crew for special requests.
“We positioned a number of multiviewers at front of house primarily to provide producers with a sense of comfort, with real-time feeds of all video resources,” said Dugger. “The Imagine Communications multiviewer we use allows the local operator to resize windows and get a closer look as desired. If they needed a camera switch on the LED screens, they could communicate their request to the truck over the intercom network and get immediate results.”
With a Dante networked audio architecture and a lighting rig fresh off the Kenny Chesney tour to further enhance mood and dynamic, Elliott believes that the Willow Creek 40th Anniversary event was a technical feat that would not be easily replicated. Much of this has to do with the professionalism of the various production arms, including the staff at Willow Creek, that brought the event the life.
“You never really know if the production will live up to the work you put in until the show is over,” said Elliott. “Trying to recreate the experience that happens regularly at Willow Creek Community Church in a vastly larger space is not an easy job. Between the spectacular program, the engaging Willow Creek content and the dedicated contractors, everyone walked away feeling proud of our achievements. That’s not always the case.”
