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Martin LED Panels Team with MACs on Hillsong Conference 2007
Following the success of the Colour Your World Conference in March, Mandylights’ Greg Yates was again behind the drawing board and then the lighting console for Australia’s largest conference – the Hillsong Conference, which saw an abundance of Martin gear in use including the new semi-transparent LC series video screens.
This conference attracted more than 26,000 Christians from 68 nations representing 19 denominations who call the Acer Arena home for five days as part of the annual Hillsong Conference. Considered Australia's largest annual conference, each year it attracts pastors, worship leaders, musicians, community workers and individual believers representing hundreds of churches.
During the conference the rig has to light everything ranging from the contemporary worship music that Hillsong is famous for, through to ballads from Guy Sebastian and Paulini, African Children’s Choirs, modern dance pieces, as well as the key note speaker presentations which have to be broadcast quality suitable to be shown on various TV networks throughout the world. A flexible and diverse range of lights allowed Greg to produce a vast range of looks.
Working off a concept sketch and a brief to have some LED archways and “forests” of lights, Greg went searching for the product to achieve the vision. The LED archways were the easy one; the new Martin LC panels were the obvious solution, especially since they had to be hung on an angle. These were fed content from a Martin Maxedia media server system; standard library images as well as clips collected by Hillsong over the years.
“The LC panels were great!” said Greg. “I used 32 of them and they looked really good. The resolution on them was not too high and not too low. You could still write text and have good definition yet also have them as background with patterns or graphics and they looked good too. They caused lots of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’! We had people/clients come to the conference to look at them and consequently we’ll be using them on other projects.”
For the forest of light Greg was looking for something more than a light globe on a cable. He was after something that would change color, dim and be ‘sparkly.’ Looking around he came up with the solution to use Pulsar ChromaStrips.
”The ChromaStrips were fantastic, probably the best little find that I’ve had in a few years,” commented Greg. “I never really knew that they existed until I was doing some work with Rohan Thornton and mentioned that I wanted something sparkly that could hang in space and he suggested the ChromaStrips. I knew straight away that they were the answer. They’re so easy to hang up and happily sparkle away whilst changing color. They really filled up the space well – sort of a virtual star drop without being a star drop.”
Greg was using the Martin TW1 tungsten wash lights for the first time. Eighteen of them provided back light. “They have a nice big fat lens in them which I always like,” said Greg. “I interspersed the TW1’s with a MAC 700 spot and it was a good combination; a big soft tungsten beam next to a bright, white discharge beam. It was a cool look that worked really well.”
The rig consisted of around six MAC 2000 Profiles, 20 MAC 2000 Washes, 18 MAC 700 Profiles, 20 MAC 700 Washes, 18 MAC TW1 washlights, 16 ChromaBanks, 70 ChromaStrips, 24 ChromaCans, four VL 1000 TS, and six VL 3000 Spot as well as conventional profiles and Fresnels. Control was via an MA Lighting grandMA controlling twelve streams of DMX. Four Look Solution Unique hazers supplied atmospherics. Lighting was provided jointly by Lots of Watts and Chameleon.
“All of the TW1’s, MAC 700 spots, MAC 2000 spots and most of the MAC 700 Washes were up in the air,” explained Greg. “On the ground I had a mix of MAC 700 Washes and VL3000 spots which I found to be a good mix that filled up lots of air. The ChromaCans I used to truss-tone some little tri-truss pods that we had whilst the ChromaBanks were placed in strips down the side of the picture frames. They helped add a bit more width and dimension - we were covering a space forty meters wide so it’s a fairly wide stage to make look good.”
24th September 2007
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