One of five Christ Community campuses in the greater Chicago area, Christ Community’s St. Charles/South Elgin location recently received a key lighting and house lighting upgrade of Elation Professional Fuze Profile and Fuze Pendant fixtures. The new lighting system is designed to offer the church greater flexibility in creating lighting atmospheres, adding immersive elements to the worship experience and savings on electricity.
The church sought assistance from JRLX, Inc., a Chicago-based firm specializing in systems integration and production, and engaged Jason Reberski to devise a solution. Prior to the pandemic, Reberski had conversations with the church regarding upgrades to their house and key lighting, as well as new power controls.
Noah Kimmel, the production director at the St. Charles/South Elgin campus, worked with Reberski on the system. “Our experience working with JRLX is always fantastic. Whenever we have a problem, they can come up with creative solutions for it. We actually just put Fuze Pendants in another one of our campuses a couple of months ago, and that was another very successful project with them,” Kimmel says.
For this latest project, the church aimed to replace outdated infrastructure and equipment. According to Reberski, the church’s original key lighting system was both power hungry and limited. He subsequently specified the Fuze Profile LED moving head because of its RGBMA color-mixing engine and myriad of features including animation, gobo wheels, framing shutters and high CRI in excess of 90.
Kimmel says, “The Fuze Profiles for key light have gone beyond being convenient for us to focus; they've allowed us at different times of the service to do different colors on the front line where one person is spot lit and the rest is washed in a color.” He adds that they’ve also had success using the gobo wheels and that the fixture has “just generally been way more user friendly for volunteers.”
The Fuze Profile is an LED moving head framing fixture that houses a 305W 6,500K RGBMA LED engine with high CRI. Its 5-color homogenized LED array not only ensures accurate color reproduction with a beautiful mixed white, it also provides color manipulation features like virtual color temperature and Magenta/Green adjustment plus CMY emulation.
The Fuze Profile is designed to pair with Elation’s Fuze Pendant as they both use a similar color spectrum engine, the only difference being the Fuze Profile houses an amber chip whereas the Fuze Pendant uses a white chip. The LED-based Fuze Pendant gives the church new house light possibilities with improved efficiency, greater power and color-changing capability they didn’t previously have.
According to Noah, “The ability to change the colors of the house lights really allows us to eliminate that division between the stage and the house. The ability to create the room as one big wash of color really makes it feel less of a performance and more of a worship environment where everybody is a part of one big action.”
The Fuze Pendant house light is designed for large areas and high-ceiling applications yet is compact enough to be adaptable to smaller spaces. It is color temperature adjustable from 2,000-10,000K and houses a full spectrum 230W RGBWL array for washes of high CRI white light, subtle pastels or pure saturates. Silent with no fans, output is up to 11,000 lumens.
Compared to the church’s old lighting system, the new Elation system uses fewer fixtures and runs at less than half the wattage. It’s a system that has not only enhanced services, it provides cost and space savings as well. Noah adds, “Beyond the power savings we now have savings in consumables. We're no longer buying gels and lamps, and also benefit from the labor savings in not having to change those out.”
