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The week-long interdenominational church camp called Wired 2016 is aimed at young people in sixth to twelfth grade and has grown rapidly over the past six years from an initial gathering of just 200-300 to this year's record attendance of 1,600.
Taking place in the Wiregrass region of Dothan, Alabama, Wired involves morning and evening worship sessions, bible teaching and community service, and a lot of fun. To create the right atmosphere for the energetic worship meetings, local production company Premier Entertainment Group designed and supplied an impressive stage-set and lighting rig that featured numerous ADJ and Elation Professional fixtures.
Dave Guiler of Premier Entertainment Group has supplied the event since its inception and has seen his company grow alongside Wired. After starting out as a DJ business 14 years ago, Premier now offers event production as well as sound, lighting and video installation services, specializing in churches and church events.
The venue for the main worship and sermon sessions of Wired 2016 was the 3,100-seat Dothan Civic Center. With input from the event's Producer, Tim Flowers, and Guiler's business partner, lighting designer Stephen Krietemeyer, the Premier Entertainment Group team installed an impactful stage, sound, lighting and video system that provided the backdrop to the week's sessions, which culminated in a large Friday evening Community Celebration event. For this, members of the local community were invited to join the Wired 2016 youngsters for an evening of worship that completely filled the venue, a fitting end to an action-packed week.
When it came to planning the lighting system for the event, Guiler and his team turned to ADJ and Elation Professional, having been long-time users of the companies' fixtures. Eight Vizi Spot 5R units were mounted in pairs above the stage-set to create downward-facing mid-air looks and GOBO projections to provide texture on the stage. These were complimented by an additional eight Vizi Beam 5R fixtures which were positioned on the floor of the stage to generate punchy beam effects shooting upwards behind the worship band as well as for washing the stage using the inbuilt Frost Filter.
Having owned Vizi Spot and Beam fixtures for three years now, Guiler is very happy both with their power and features as well as their reliability. “They are really impressive fixtures”, he says, “and we've had very minimal issues with them. When we do have a little problem, getting parts from ADJ is very easy and quick, which is fantastic. Every time we've dealt with ADJ, the service has always been top notch. That's why we've continued to buy ADJ, investing more recently in Hex Bars.”
The stage set itself consisted of tall and thin video panels interspersed with textured semi-transparent aluminum mesh sections supported by truss pillars. To illuminate these backdrop elements, Guiler used his newly-purchased ADJ Ultra Hex Bars with their 10-Watt 6-in-1 Hex LEDs incorporating UV. These versatile fixtures were also used as footlights to illuminate the musicians on stage as well as for ambient up-lighting, with a grand total of 32 of the units used across the production.
For down-lighting the stage the Premier Entertainment Group team selected SixPar 200 LED par fixtures from the range of ADJ's sister company Elation professional. A total of 24 of the units were positioned above the stage and also on trusses located to either side of the stage which were fixed to the top of Global Truss ST-180 18' crank stands. These fixtures were used to illuminate the audience, providing more atmospheric lighting than was offered by the venue's house lights in order to envelop the audience in what was happening on stage.
For added wow-factor the lighting setup on stage was augmented by four Elation Professional Lumina Matrix units, which each incorporate 16 individually controllable 7W warm white LEDs mounted in halogen-look reflectors. This allowed for interesting chases as well as impactful audience blinder effects to be integrated into the lightshow.
Overall, Guiler says the stage set and lighting effects looked stunning and provided the perfect background for the sets from guest worship leader Jared Wood and his band. The event was hailed as a big success by the organizers, Guiler and his team, as well as the hundreds of young people in attendance.
