Billing itself as a "church for people who don't like church," Real Life Church in Valencia, Calif. didn't follow a conventional path when it built its own facility after nearly a decade of holding services in, first, a movie theater and, most recently, a high school auditorium. Everything about the Valencia, Calif.-based church's new 40,000 sq. ft. building was planned to serve the "real life" needs of its congregants and the greater community – from a coffeehouse in its basement to its centralized location for touring concerts to the environmentally-friendly design of the structure itself, which sits largely underground to reduce energy requirements for heating and cooling.
At the hub of the building is Real Life Church's main sanctuary, an amphitheater-style auditorium that seats 1,200. In addition to accommodating worship services, the room was required to function as a video studio and a venue for local musical and theatrical productions could be staged, said Richard Rutherford, Rutherford Design (Northridge, Calif.), designer/supplier of the building's audio, video and theatrical lighting systems.
"The church is very media savvy," said Rutherford, who was involved in project from the start. "They shoot everything in hi-def video – 16:9 widescreen ratio. Their media director really understands what it takes to create good quality video." This meant lighting would take on special significance, Rutherford added. "It's like the old joke goes, ‘There are only three important things for video – lighting, lighting and lighting.'"
With so much emphasis on video, the church's media staff wanted to include conventional lights "to boost the horsepower" for TV production, said Rutherford. But other key components of Real Life Church's stage lighting system include LED par cans and automated moving heads from Elation Professional.
Twenty Elation Opti RGBs, a color-mixing LED par can, form the basis of the stage's side and back lighting. Operating on 7 DMX channels, the Opti RGB contains 24 1-watt red, green and blue LEDs (eight of each color) with RGB mixing and dimming capabilities. Conventional lights notwithstanding, "what they really wanted was a theatrical look. And the most cost-effective way to do that powerfully was to use the Opti RGBs on the side lighting and all back positions," said Rutherford. "This allows us to flood the stage in any color we want really well."
Because of the high vertical level of the seating in the amphitheater, barn doors are used on all the Opti RGBs. "If you're seated at the back of the house, you're just a few feet below the sight level of the fixtures. So we put barn doors on them to hide the color-mixing ‘magic,' so to speak, so that people would just see the end result of the color on stage. The barn doors have worked really well," said Rutherford. Another modification was to change the fixture profiles to all crossfade, which has resulted in "really smooth crossfades and transitions between the colors."
In addition to the Opti RGB, Rutherford used four of Elation's Power Spot 575 DMX moving heads on the front of house truss to light up the many musical and theatrical performances held at Real Life Church. The Power Spot 575, a powerful 575-watt discharge fixture with color and gobo wheels and other effects, "works well where we want to use a spotlight-type look for live musical performances," said Rutherford. "Even though it has more features than we need, it's got a really great light output and offers a super value for the dollar, which makes it an excellent choice for theatrical applications."
Rutherford also chose an Elation product for controlling Real Life Church's stage lighting system: the Show Designer 2CF DMX controller. Featuring 2 DMX universe outputs with a total of 1024 DMX channels, the Show Designer 2CF can control up to 48 moving light fixtures of up to 32 channels each, and up to 1152 programmable chases, 4752 programmable scenes and 1152 programmable shows. It has a large built-in fixture library, 80-character backlit display and Compact Flash Drive.
Rutherford said he chose the Show Designer 2CF because "it's an easy controller to do fairly complex scene design with, and it's quite easy to train on. It's also a very cost-efficient controller that can do a great job with both conventional and intelligent lighting."
Low cost was also a key selling point. "While there's certainly more expensive stuff we could have used, we didn't need unusable features at an unusable price," Rutherford concluded.
