Reprinted from the Nov/Dec 2009 issue of Church Production Magazine
How Did They Do That? Hope Community Church, Raleigh, NC
“Lighting/Video Wall” creates high-dollar effect at a surprising low cost
In this new column, each month we'll explore ways in which church technical teams get creative with their resources, and come up with innovative solutions.
This month we'll talk with Bob Blair, the technical director at Hope Community Church in Raleigh, NC, about their low-cost "LED Tubes.” The effect was a metamorphosis of a couple of ideas. Blair had seen another church use white PVC tubes as a lighting surface, and in the meantime built a frame incorporating two-inch PVC pipe that was painted red to augment another set piece for a sermon series they were doing.
Blair and his team thought it might be cool to devise a surface using the two-inch PVC painted white that they could project images on. Their existing setup utilizes three projection screens (left, right and center) with a center 20-foot by 12-foot screen, and the idea was perhaps that center projection area could be used for the effect they wanted to accomplish.
After some trial and error (a 20-foot by 12-foot frame with two-inch PVC would be far too heavy to be practical) Blair remembered that he had a large quantity of four-foot protective sleeves for fluorescent tube lights left over from a previous project.
Blair continues saying, "So we made a square wooden frame, painted the tubes white and lifted them up on our lift and put some lights against it and said, 'It really does look good.’ It didn't really matter what kind of paint we used. We used everything from flat, to glossy, to some kind of reflective paint that I found, and it really didn’t change the effect. So then we said, 'What would it look like if we put video on it?' So we moved it over to where we have a projector, and it really didn't look all that bad. We went ahead and built a 20-foot by 12-foot grid of four-foot by four-foot frames and put the tubes in them, painted all the tubes white and painted all the frames black and screwed all the frames together and hoisted it up and threw the projector on it and went, ‘Wow, that looks kind of cool!’" Blair adds, "Since there's a one to one and a half-inch gap between the tubes we figured that it wouldn't be nearly as bright as the screens, but when we got it up there we realized that it looked just as good as the screens and figured we had a winner. Then to top it all off, we found a device called the Matrox Triple Head to Go. It basically allows us to take an output from our computer and instead of a 1280 x 720 palette, create a 3240 x 720 palette. So we're actually able to create graphics that are three screens wide. Now that “center-piece video-LED-wall-looking thing” is part of a three wide graphic element that we're able to project on. And the coolest thing about it was the Matrox is less than $400. By the time it was all over and done with we probably had not much more than $1,000 in this 20-foot by 12-foot grid that looks like an LED wall."
Mark Johnson is an independent technical trainer/writer based in Crockett, Calif., and former editor of Sound & Video Contractor and Church Production magazines. He can be reached at mjohnson6286@sbcglobal.net.