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Church of Frogs
Saddleback Community Church is a sprawling 120-acre campus in Orange County, south of Los Angeles. Started in 1980 by Rick and Kay Warren, Saddleback Community Church has grown from a seven person bible study group to an average weekend attendance of 20,000 with 80,000 names on the church roll. It has also spawned the ‘Purpose Driven Movement’, which has trained over 350,000 pastors and church leaders. Looking more like a mall than a church, Saddleback boasts six separate venues and seven distinct types of service each weekend. As well as a main worship center and separate meeting rooms, the Saddleback campus uses three permanent tent structures as additional venues.
“The tents are every bit as solid as a brick and mortar structure,” comments Griffin. “They have air conditioning, are earthquake and hurricane safe, but they have the advantage of being much faster to erect than a conventional structure. They also have the added bonus, from a lighting point of view, of being white on the inside.”
Although the main worship center boasts 28 moving lights and a Flying Pig System’s Wholehog III control system, the intelligent lighting is only really used to add flexibility rather than for its effect. It is in the smaller Tent Two where lighting plays much more of a key role. Although having several venues allows for very different types of services to be held, the automated lighting system in Tent Two allows for that venue to be used for multiple types of service. A simple Saturday morning service with a simple static look for older parishioners is followed in the afternoon with a more information-heavy service, with lighting to match, catering to a significantly younger audience. Sunday morning in Tent Two is a no-holds-barred rock concert and is followed on Sunday evening with a service featuring alternative college-age music.
Lighting for the inside of Tent Two consists of 30 ETC Source Four Pars with Wybron Forerunner color scrollers on them, eight Coemar Panorama Cyc color mixing fixtures and twelve Martin MAC 250+ fixtures. Control is in the form of a Zero 88 Fat Frog console, which Griffin seems particularly enamored with. “I love them,” says Griffin simply. “I use five pages of submasters for moving light looks, and I have the two scene preset for all the conventional fixtures. With the two scene preset, users can go back and forth with stage looks and pick whatever they want from the moving light looks. I have volunteers who have never run a lighting console before in their lives. They sit there and run lights all day and love it because the Fat Frog is so easy to use. Also, the added functionality of having things like palettes and an effects generator for motion really helps. A lot of that stuff does not exist in other entry level consoles.”
Griffin’s consulting work ranges from completely new installations to making minor adjustments to existing installations to make them more ‘user friendly.’ Recently, he added four High End Technobeams to an existing installation of eight Geni Shiva scans and replaced the old conventional console with one more suited to the task of controlling intelligent fixtures. “I took the Fat Frog from Tent Two over to the church in Irvine, so they could see what it could do with their fixtures,” remarks Griffin. “Suddenly, they realized just what was possible with their lights. Ultimately, we put a Leap Frog in there, so that they will have room for expansion.”
The specification of the wrong equipment into churches is something that Griffin sees all too often. Another recent consulting project was due to the installation of an NSI two scene preset manual console to control twelve Martin Mac 500 moving lights. “They called me saying that they’d had this console for six months and couldn’t program any cues on it,” says Griffin. “When I saw what they had, it was no wonder they were having problems. I called my local dealer, California Stage and Lighting, to get a Bull Frog Demo console, and the church ended up buying it that day.”
Griffin believes in the right equipment for the job and he has found himself specifying and installing the Zero 88 Frog consoles more and more. “The best thing about the Frog range is the price point, which is incredible,” comments Griffin. “Most of these smaller churches are staffed completely by volunteers; they are not lighting people, and they are not even particularly technical people. You don’t want to put in an expensive $10,000 controller that requires a three-day training course, but at the same time, they don’t want to go to the other extreme and have something that is unusable. I’ve been really surprised by how easy it is for people who don’t have a theatrical background to pick up these consoles.”
15th November 2004
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