Birmingham Church Engages Attendees with LED Video Enhancements
Dedicated to working with house of worship leaders and founders, the Association of Relational Churches provides the support, guidance and resources needed for worship communities to take root and grow. As part of their mission, the association hosts semi-annual ARC Conferences at different locale around the country.
For the ARC Conference event held in late April at Church of the Highlands, a non-denominational Christian mega-church with more than 32,000 worshipping at multiple campuses in the Birmingham, AL area, the event brought together church leaders for Main Sessions, smaller App Sessions, and other events allowing for church pastors and others to network and share ideas. The conference then closed with an after party.
An Inclusive Environment
Church of the Highlands’ experience director Brian Worster worked with event organizers to stage the event at the church’s Grants Mill campus. The idea was to bring together a production design that would wrap the audience members in an environment of encouragement and fellowship. LED video played a key role, and Worster turned to PixelFLEX technologies including the company’s FLEXLite Plus 3.9mm panels.
“Church of the Highlands initially hosted the ARC Conference several years ago, and then it came back to us this year for the first of its two annual conferences,” says Worster. “As the host church, the event organizers really leave the production design up to us with a bit of freedom. To put the full design together, we started by looking at the theme of the conference and what we could technically achieve, then we developed a design that matched both. With the theme of this conference being ‘There is Room at the Table,’ we wanted to create all-inclusive environment using a curved LED wall, so we chose the FLEXLite Plus LED video technology from PixelFLEX.”
The FLEXLite Plus was capable of a 15° curve in any direction, and is one of the highest resolution curve-able LED displays on the market. Producers are always concerned how the video will look on camera, whether it be on film or a simple photo taken by an audience member. Because of its bright, dense display and high refresh rate, FLEXLite Plus photographs and videos smoothly, and its tiles are calibrated directly out of the box to help decrease failure, while promising users perfect color and brightness of their LED screen.
“When we started putting the video design together, we wanted the LED wall to really reach out and bring the audience into the worship environment to ‘welcome them at the table,’ so to speak,” Worster adds. “To do this, we designed the wall into three areas with a center wall that was 24 feet wide, and then two outer walls that curved into the house that each stood at 17.5 feet wide. With the walls ground-supported using vertical truss, they really wrapped the audience in the full production design, and it worked wonderfully to support the theme of the ARC Conference.” On top of this, the design called for a ground row of the same tiles stretching across the width of the stage, about two meters off the ground.
A Tight Schedule
With a load-in schedule limited to two days, it was important for the LED elements to be assembled quickly on-site so that the designers, performers and crew would have ample time to fine-tune the programming and rehearsals for the event. FLEXLite Plus also fit in well with the production design, as it adapted to the designer’s vision. A team of three technicians were sent down by PixelFLEX to work with the four in-house video techs.
“On the first day of load-in, we focused on all the equipment that needed to be flown, and then on the second day we turned our attention to the ground-supported equipment that included the PixelFLEX LED wall,” Worster notes. “Physically, we supported each if the LED walls with vertical truss, and we really had no issues assembling the LED wall to get ready for programming in the time needed, which was a tremendous advantage.”
Final Preparations
Once load-in was complete, Worster and the creative team at Church of the Highlands next got to work programming the custom content and stock motion graphics that would be needed to envelop the audience in the all-encompassing LED environment. I-Mag was used during worship moments and shown on the center screen. The media playback was all accomplished with the use of a Green Hippo Boreal media server. The pixels were mapped on the LED screen through a Vista Spyder. Lighting director Patrick Hentz programmed and controlled the Boreal through his High End Systems Hog4 console.
“For the walk-in and walk-out sequences and the individual speaking moments, we created custom content graphics, but then for the song worship we used stock video from Church Motion Graphics,” Worster continues. “At times we were able to treat the entire canvas as one large raster, but then we were also able to treat each wall as its own individual canvas to really get the most out of the design. I really love how easy it is to program on the PixelFLEX line of LED video technologies, and the FLEXLite Plus really gave our video design a completely new dimension.”
It’s Showtime!
Now ready to see the FLEXLite truly bring the audience into the design at the ARC Conference, Worster was confident that they had both achieved the ideal worship environment and chosen the ideal LED video solution to tie it all together.
“I have used the PixelFLEX line of LED technologies previously at Church of the Highlands, so when we started looking for a curved LED product for the ARC Conference, we were confident PixelFLEX had the technology to deliver,” concludes Worster. “Visually, the FLEXLite Plus LED walls looked amazing. They were crisp and bright and the colors looked fantastic. We were very pleased with the performance of the LED walls and they really helped the ARC Conference look beautiful.”
The next ARC conference is set to take place in Anaheim, CA on Oct 18-19.
