With a seating capacity of approximately 150, Preparing the Way Ministries’ auditorium in Lake Charles, Louisiana is a relatively small but modern space. Worship for Sunday services is led by a multi-piece contemporary worship band and the facility is also used for midweek prayer and worship meetings which tend to feature a more stripped-back music group. Until recently, the church’s lighting setup involved stage washing provided by eight ADJ 5PX Hex LED par fixtures controlled via an iPad running ADJ’s Airstream DMX app connected wirelessly to the Airstream DMX Bridge interface.
Having made the decision to invest in developing the lighting technology in their facility, the church’s leadership brought in specialist AV integration company Stevens Audio Visual to advise on potential options for the upgrade. Established in 2018 by Greg Stevens, who has extensive experience in church production as well as AV installation, Stevens AV provides a full-service offering of system design, equipment sales, installation and commissioning with a particular focus on the house of worship market.
“I met with the church and discussed various options,” explains Stevens. “They wanted to do something more creative with their lighting and the worship leader had drawn up a rough schematic for using LED strip fixtures to fill in the dead space on the very plain and uninspiring walls at the back of the stage. Initially they were thinking about just regular LED strips, but I recommended a pixel-mapped low-res video system as that seemed like the best solution to achieve their desired result. We installed a product that worked well at first, but after a short while it started to develop problems. Odd fixtures would lose their IP addresses and stop functioning. We switched out various fixtures and cables, but couldn’t get to the bottom of the problem, although the building has very dirty power so we think that was probably to blame.”
Regardless of the source of the issue, Stevens says his customer-focused business model means that leaving the church anything other than completely satisfied with their new lighting system was completely out of the question. Therefore, in the end he decided to completely replace the original installation with ADJ’s newly launched Pixie Strip series of pixel-mappable linear LED fixtures. Unlike the original product used for this project, which utilized on-board processing and required separate power and signal cables run to each fixture, the Pixie Strip system features a separate standalone processing unit, the Pixie Driver 2000. This device requires a single power supply and data feed (either Kling-Net, Art-Net or sACN) and then outputs a combined power/signal feed via two proprietary 4-pin connections. Each of these can be daisy-chained between multiple Pixie Strip fixtures to drive up to 1020 pixels (170 using Kling-Net).
The Pixie Strip series offers three sizes of pixel strip bars, which can be combined together in any combination to fit with the dimensions and design of a stage or set. The largest model, the Pixie Strip 120 measures 2 meters (78.8”) in length and features 120 tri-color RGB SMD LEDs. The mid-size bar in the series is the Pixie Strip 60, which is 1 meter (39.4”) long and is fitted with 60 LEDs. Finally, the smallest model in the series is the Pixie Strip 30, a 0.5 meter bar that features 30 LEDs. For the Preparing the Way church project, Stevens and his team installed eight of the largest units and six of the medium-sized models to fill the blank space on the two walls which join together to form a backdrop for the auditorium’s corner stage.
“It is a very flexible system,” enthuses Stevens, “making it ideal for a church setting where it’s important to strike the right balance between drawing people in to what is happening on stage but not distracting them from it. You can change the brightness levels, change the color scheme, and have the versatility to create anything from a static look or slow-moving pattern right up to high energy effects. You can really create an atmosphere for whatever you want to do. So, if you want a very exciting look for something celebratory, definitely the system is capable of rapid movement and bright flashing color, but you can also achieve very subtle effects. It really creates a lot of atmosphere in the space for a relatively nominal amount of money when you consider what some churches spend on their lighting.”
To generate this varied collection of effects, Stevens AV supplied the church with an ArKaos MediaMaster setup. This was configured for the Pixie Strip installation and pre-loaded with a variety of different animated effects which can be selected and triggered by the church’s volunteer technical team. The result is a system that the church leaders are very pleased with, both because of the visual effects that can be created and because it has proved 100% reliable.
Stevens says he worked tirelessly to get this project right for his client, and that his dedication was appreciated. So much so, they’re already talking about expanding the system. ADJ also strives to give the best possible service to its customers, something that hasn’t gone unnoticed by Stevens and his team.
“ADJ has been a solid company for us in terms of service,” he confirms. “We get to deal with real people, who know their stuff and are always happy to help. Mike Turner (ADJ’s Central Regional Sales Manager) always makes himself available to us and provides any support we need. In fact, he even took the time out of his weekend and drove six hours to help us commission this system and then stayed for the first Sunday service the next day to make sure everything ran smoothly. Bob Mentele (ADJ’s Vertical Market Manager for Houses of Worship) has also been an invaluable resource for us, providing design and technical assistance for a number of the projects we’ve worked on recently using both ADJ and Elation Professional products (ADJ’s sister company). Finally, Corey Saenz (ADJ’s Video Product Specialist) has helped us out a number of times with specific technical questions. Having these people at the end of a phone really makes the difference for us as integrators and is one of the reasons we are loyal ADJ customers, that and – of course – the quality and reliability of the actual product.”
Despite this project proving to be one of the more challenging undertaken by Stevens AV, Stevens and his team ensured that the end result delivered exactly what their client required in a robust and reliable system. The ADJ Pixie Strip Series is designed to create visually-stunning backdrops to the church’s stage, giving the worship team the versatility to select from a wide variety of looks to enhance the atmosphere of either raucous up-tempo praise music or slow reflective moments and everything else in between. And its not only enhancing the in-person worship, but also benefitting the increased number now watching the church’s livestreams from home during the pandemic.
