Established in 1982, Cherry Hills looks outwards as much as inwards, combining the earthly and ecclesiastical with pop-culture flair. By delivering the message in a variety of contemporary ways, Cherry Hills keeps members of its congregation, ages 6 to 60-plus, active in the ministry through entertaining and (dare we say) secular activities, such as snowboarding jaunts, spectacular annual musical events and children’s sports camps.
It follows, then, that when Cherry Hills wanted to upgrade its 3,500-seat Worship Center, a cavernous space that hosts Sunday service and musical performances, it looked to the material world.
“I went to the U2 360° concert this summer and happened to bump into several members of the congregation,” says Scott Nelson, production director for Cherry Hills’ Worship Experience Team. “They are experiencing technology in that type of realm and, in our own way, we need to do things that can appeal to those type of people.”
The Design Plan
Cherry Hills’ plan was to install, in its Worship Center, a highly mobile trussing and power supply matrix, resembling a touring rig, and a rock-concert-like lighting system, boasting 140-plus energy-efficient programmable moving lighting units, including 32 new Vari*Lite VL770 spots, 68 Martin MAC 301 and 101 LED washes, 36 Color Kinetics Chroma-Q Color Force 12s, and a handful of Vari*Lite VL3500Q sharp-focus spots.
“We wanted a design that enabled us to do just about anything we could conceive of for our annual Christmas at the Ranch musical event and regular Sunday service,” says Nelson. “We wanted the design to be winsome and culturally relevant.”
Jeff Lavallee, designer and programmer who incorporated 44 Production Designs in 2007, understood exactly what they were after: “They wanted something edgy,” Lavallee says flatly. “They wanted something a little more out of the box for a church. Something creative and mobile.”
Pre-Installic History
The lighting installation, begun in late November and completed in the December 2011, was only one phase of a larger Worship Center upgrade. Fundraising appeals began in 2007 with the goal of fetching $3.5 million for upgrades to the video and audio systems (both now finished) and improvements to interior design; $750,000 of the nearly $2.5 million raised, so far, has been allocated to lighting.
In preparation of the lighting install, Cherry Hills contacted Nashville-based 44 Production Designs, responsible for dazzling production looks for such big names as Lady Antebellum, Matchbox 20, Tim McGraw and even the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush. In 2010 Cherry Hills brought in 44’s LD, Darien Koop, for two weeks to design the church’s annual Christmas at the Ranch event and soak up the church culture to get a better idea of how the production tech team operates. Koop utilized the church’s in-house fixtures amassed over the last decade or so, as well as rented gear, which allowed the church to demo equipment they’d eventually install, such as the VL3500Qs and MAC 301s.
Despite having a sizeable inventory (i.e. ellipsoidals and PARs with gel scrollers), the church’s lighting array lacked a cohesive design and “consumed an enormous amount of energy,” says Kevin Ostrom, lighting director for the Worship Experience Team.
“Also, we were limited by the scrollers from the standpoint of color selection,” says Nelson. “One of the goals was to remove all the gel scrollers and put in fixed LED lights in those locations. The more we thought about it, the more we said, ‘If we invest in something like MAC 101s, we could have more flexibility.”
Watts New
Many of the church’s in-house lighting fixtures were on the fritz or not powerful enough to fulfill the church’s needs. “We have a fair amount of ambient lighting coming through the windows of our Worship Center, so we needed something that could cut through that,” says Nelson.
Enter Vari-Lite’s new VL770 spot, which emits over 15,000 lumens and arrived just in time for the installation and load-in of Christmas at the Ranch in mid December. “What made the 770s so attractive is the 700-watt output at the price point of a 250- or a 400-watt fixture,” says Peter Maurelli, head of systems integration at Barbizon Light of the Rockies, the Denver branch of the Barbizon Lighting Company, which provided gear, integration help and ongoing support for the Cherry Hills lighting installation. “It allowed the church to purchase 32 fixtures instead of 14 or 24.”
Taking a Temperature
The VL770s also presented challenges to the technical team. The programming process revealed a color temperature difference between the 770s and recently-installed 3500Qs. “The look of the blue of the 770s, for instance, is a bit colder, ‘bluer’, than the 3500s,” says Ostrom.
Maurelli maintains that each fixture contains a distinct lamp, accounting for the difference in color temperature. “I confirmed with Vari*Lite that they had no intention of matching the 770s with their existing fixtures,” says Maurelli.
As of this writing, adjustments via color corrections were being discussed. Nonetheless, it should be noted that the 770s — and all the other lighting fixtures installed — have slashed the church’s soaring energy costs in half while solving the Worship Center’s ambient light issues. “They’ve even helped achieve balance between lighting and video,” adds Ostrom. “Prior to the installation of the 770s it was a little bit of a challenge due to our upgrade to HD.”
Goin’ Mobile
One of Cherry Hills’ goals for the install was greater flexibility and ease of maintenance vis-à-vis the lighting rig. The symmetrical or mirror-image-like lighting plot, designed by Lavallee and drawn by graphic designer Anthony “Geddy” Kordyjaka, ensured that fixture malfunctions wouldn’t interrupt an event. “Every fixture is patched to its corresponding counterpart on the other side of the rig,” explains Maurelli. “What we did is build a custom distro rack with patchable pigtails, kind of like on an old touring dimmer rack. If one fixture failed, we could turn off the breaker on the power distro, the mirror fixture would go out, too, and the look of the lighting rig would remain symmetrical.”
To conform to Lavallee’s design, the tech team mixed and matched standard Total Structures’ Totalite truss sizes (i.e. 10’, 8’, 4’, 3’) to create odd truss lengths, as they did for the semi-radial configuration of five finger-like trusses located above the downstage area. The Totalites have no end plates, allowing for seamless chord connections between each unit. “They appear as one continuous piece,” says Maurelli. “Extra pieces of trussing, measuring four feet, were purchased so the church could extend the trusses out for future applications.”
The truss sections, custom powder -coated in black, are controlled via Motion Laboratories’ 24- and 4-channel controllers, which drive 24 Columbus McKinnon ½-ton and four ¼-ton motors. “We’re able to dip some of the trusses, bring them up higher,” says Ostrom. “The sky’s the limit.”
“Those motors can use an adapter, so you can plug them right into the wall,” says Maurelli. “If they wanted to use them in the lobby or the atrium, they could do that.”
Barbizon troubleshot everything — from a 225-foot multi-cable being connected to the wrong multi-circuit to a defective motor transformer. Nelson reveals that Cherry Hills awarded Barbizon the bid largely based on its proximity to the church. A wise move. “If the church had gone with an outside vendor, those issues wouldn’t have been resolved as quickly,” says Maurelli.
Christmas at the Ranch
The first major production the church coordinated after the lighting install was the annual Christmas at the Ranch musical event, which was presented four times between Dec 9 and Dec 11, 2011, and featured, among others, a Christian pop-rock house band and a 300-person strong choir. For the event, Lavallee programmed 400 lighting cues on a Jands Vista T2 console (running v2 software), which was installed in 2010.
“I listened to the music maybe once or twice before we started programming,” admits Lavallee. “For dark songs, and I hate using that word in reference to a church, but for dark songs you want to use your dark blues, your Congos and your greens. When you do this time after time, you sense patterns.”
Creative director Jim Shaffer was Lavallee’s “eyes and ears,” Lavallee says. “Jim had been at the rehearsals, so he was familiar with the music and the movement on stage. He knew who and what needed to be frontlit or backlit and how much.”
One of the looks Lavallee is most proud of occurred during the show’s dance sequence, in which four flowing 30-foot drapes, secured to the catwalk, were dropped by technicians high above the stage. As the drapes unfurled, the dancers grabbed them and performed on a 9-foot by 45-foot extension stage (a temporary addition to the permanent 36-foot by 70-foot stage), creating evocative patterns in fabric and light. The dance performance made great use of the recently-installed VL770s and was one of the rare instances in which front-lighting wasn’t used to illuminate a performance.
“We frontlit so many vocalists,” says Lavallee. “But side lighting provided the perfect angle for the curtains in that performance. We used 10 VL770s to create a minimal look to focus on the drama of the dancers. At the end of the song, the female dancers rip the drapes off of Velcro strips. Then multi-colored gobos in the 770s lit up part of the audience as well as the dancers, who exited down the main aisle, with the drapes flowing behind them. One of the things I like to do as a designer is change your frame of reference and bring the audience into the show. With that look, I think we’d achieved that.”
Overall, the lighting install and 2011’s Christmas at the Ranch show, seen by a record-breaking 13,400, were great successes. Nelson, who is also the church’s FOH sound engineer, concludes: “An elderly couple came up to my tech booth during intermission for the Sunday night performance of the Christmas event. I was reluctant to engage them in a conversation, because someone at your booth usually means bad news. But I greeted them and asked how they were enjoying the event. To my surprise, they said, ‘We are absolutely loving it.’ They specifically told me that the lighting made the show this year. That pretty much says it all.”
Gear
Lighting:
1 Jands Vista T2 Lighting Console, running v2
5 Vari*Lite VL3500Q-Spots
32 Vari*Lite VL770 Spots
26 Martin MAC Wash fixtures
42 Martin MAC 101s
36 Chroma-Q Color Force 12” RGBA
Truss:
30 Total Structures Totalite truss sections (16 TL120B/10ft; 2 TL96B/8ft; 7 TL48B/4ft; 5 TL36B/3ft)
28 Columbus McKinnon hoists (24 CM-F three phase ½ ton; 4 CM- ProStar 115V ¼ ton)
2 Motion Laboratories controllers (1200-24-F-SS-0703 24-ch and 1200-4-C-K-0703 4-ch)
Misc:
2 Pathport Octo 8-port
9 DMX Repeater, 8-Way
2 Cisco SF300-08 Ethernet switch
Applied Electronics 1300-PD patchable power distro; Cam-lok input & pass thru; 400A main breaker; 6 x 20A 2-pole circuit breakers wired to 1 x VSC 6-circuit 208VAC outputs, 72 x 20A 1-pole circuit breaker, 72 x 20A 120VAC Edison duplex, 23 x VSC 6-circuit wired to (6) 36” Edison patch cables
