1 of 4
To achieve a thorough saturation of color throughout the worship space, the stage lighting system is augmented with 23 Chroma-Q Inspire RGBW LED pendant fixtures.
2 of 4
The stage inputs at Valley Creek’s Lewisville campus include Countryman H6 omnidirectional headsets and Shure ULX-D Series wireless systems. The church also uses Sennheiser EW 300 Series in-ear wireless systems and Shure SE425 earbuds with Roland M48 personal monitor mixers.
3 of 4
A Hitachi Z-HD5000 studio camera equipped with a Fujinon XA20s x 8.5BRM HD lens captures the action and provides a source for basic IMAG.
4 of 4
Valley Creek services are attended by 5,000-6,000 worshippers weekly and as many as 10,000 during holidays, including the many visitors to Valley Creek’s popular online campus.
The addition of Valley Creek Church’s fourth campus in Lewisville, Texas, is interesting news in and of itself. But the bigger story is that Valley Creek is not only using technology to expand its congregation and reach, but doing so in way that is both practical and keeps its brand intact. Worshippers can look forward to experiencing the same worship experience from location to location, and volunteers find the similar equipment easy to operate.
Editor's Note: Valley Creek Church will host a Church Production LIVE! Showcase Event on August 12, 2017 sponsored by Chroma Q – A.C. Lighting, Summit Integrated and Yamaha. For more information (visit link)
Working closely with an experienced integrator, Valley Creek Live Production Director Chris Kozen has carefully orchestrated the recent efforts of the technology teams and church leaders to provide Valley Creek with a master technical plan that can extend its vision for worship to new locations of any size. “Our main campus at Flower Mound, Texas, was thoughtfully planned as a blueprint for our technology moving forward into other campuses like Lewisville,” he says.
A vision for growth
Four years ago, when Valley Creek’s main campus in Flower Mound, Texas, was overflowing, Valley Creek’s leadership team began planning for a new facility, but rather than design a larger space that only anticipated growth in Flower Mound, the team began work on a larger vision that also considered expanding to other communities. “Our heart at Valley Creek is about our call to be a missional church. Of course, we felt that we were called to serve our body in Flower Mound, but also the region around us. Building just enough for a main campus allowed us to keep moving out into new communities, creating new campuses and new leaders there,” Kozen says. “When our buildings are filling up that’s an opportunity for us to launch new campuses and new leaders.”
Kozen’s experience as both a professional musician, recording engineer and small business owner has provided him with a unique perspective. “I grew up in a family of musicians,” he notes. “My grandmother and mother were both church pianists.” With a Music Education degree from Penn State University and a Masters degree in Music Performance from the prestigious music school, the University of North Texas, Kozen was a proficient classical cellist and symphony trombonist, but his technical side drew him to engineer location recordings of musical productions. That passion became a successful business. Kozen soon added more skills gained while working at FOH audio and learning lighting design. “As a musician behind an audio console,” he recalls, “I understood what I wanted to hear and how to achieve it. Being in touch with the emotion in a performance, I could work with the technology to enhance that.”
Kozen was introduced to Valley Creek Church after visiting with them to provide on-site training and ultimately found a home there. On staff now for 10 years, he has worked to develop a culture where the staff acts as mentors. “Our goal is to raise teams up. Essentially, we learn, coach and hand it off,” he says. “Now it’s to the point where I rarely get to touch equipment.”
A master technology plan
Kozen’s goal for all campuses is to create a space where people can encounter God in a distraction-free way, where worshippers can engage and go deeper. He says, “If someone walks away focused on our technology, then we’ve missed our mark.”
Valley Creek services are attended by 5,000-6,000 worshippers weekly and as many as 10,000 during holidays, including the many visitors to Valley Creek’s popular online campus. Each service at a remote campus has a similar look and flow and is run by a small staff that also includes a live video production coordinator and two part-time campus staff members, with all other technical positions being manned by volunteers. At Flower Mound, the church’s main campus, there are typically 12-15 volunteers who serve for each service. Each week, the message is recorded during a Thursday night service, edited on Friday, and distributed to remote campuses, as well as being made available online. A digital copy, delivered via DropBox, acts as backup.
The church has worked closely with Summit Integrated Systems of Lafayette, Colo., on recent campus expansions. Deron Yevoli, Summit’s Project Manager, notes that the Valley Creek’s technology plan considers standardization, scalability and quality equally. “Valley Creek understands who they are,” he says, “and how that plays out in the design of new campuses.” As an example, Yevoli points to the importance of keeping key design elements common, including familiar floor plans and the shape of the worship area, to keep the “feel” of Valley Creek.
Most recently, Valley Creek’s master technology plan was tested at the new Lewisville campus, a reclaimed 60,000-square-foot grocery store converted into an 850-seat worship space along with adult classrooms, three children’s auditoriums, child care, atrium, cafe and ample additional space for community areas. The guiding principles of the plan call for technology that is easy to operate, reliable and replicable in order to recreate the Valley Creek experience. Valley Creek also wanted the plan repeatable for spaces from 200-1,000 seats, as well as provide for quality equipment while maintaining the basic tenets of good stewardship. While this might seem like an impossible wish list, the combined experience of Kozen and Yevoli pointed them to a key element in the plan that would make this possible: Identifying items that could remain the same from location to location with only
simple changes in quantities needed and other items, like audio, that need to be designed to the specifics of the new location.
Scalability plays an important role in Valley
Creek’s major equipment choices. Kozen points to the benefits of choosing quality audio consoles like the popular Yamaha CL Series that can provide high production quality and long-term maintainability along with the financial benefits of scalability. “It means that we can find the right tool for the right job,” he says, “and not be forced to overbuy or compromise. We can opt for a CL5 console in a larger facility or scale down to the smaller CL1 where that gives us what we need.”
For lighting, Kozen notes that MA Lighting’s grandMA consoles are similarly available in different sizes down to PC software.
Because volunteer operation is a critical part of Valley Creek’s plans for all campuses, the team pays particular attention to the ease-of-use and gravitates toward familiar interfaces when choosing equipment to be added to Valley Creek’s master technology plan. The team’s favorite technology choices also provide consistent interfaces and operation so team members are more easily trained and can more easily fill-in at different locations. According to Kozen, these choices prove out in practice. “By keeping the major production control systems the same,” he observes, “there is little or no panic for the volunteers when situations change unexpectedly. Volunteers can go to any campus, know what to expect, and get right to work producing a consistent result.”
Creating Great Audio
Having identified audio as one area that would need special attention at Lewisville, Summit Integrated arranged for demos of sound systems that would provide great sound for the worship space. The team was most impressed with demos of a system built around the compact Nexo two-way Geo S1210 loudspeaker. According to Yevoli, the Nexo system was a perfect fit with both the 28-foot ceilings at Lewisville and wide format required for the installation.
After acoustical treatment of the space using 24 4x4x2-foot tilted wall panels and 18 barrel wall diffusers, 12 Nexo Geo S1210 loudspeakers equipped with GPT-FLG 120-degree dispersion flanges were installed in two arrays for stereo coverage along with two Nexo PS10 Compact two-way, full-range loudspeakers placed as outfill. Four Nexo RS18-PI, low profile, dual subwoofers each with two 18-inch drivers were flown two-by-two in an end-fire configuration to achieve the most consistent sub-frequency coverage throughout the room. In addition, four Nexo ID24-T12040 dual four-inch fill speakers were configured as front-fill in order to help the front rows localize the audio in a more natural location.
One Nexo NXAmp 4X4 high power amplifier is employed for low drivers in the mains and a second NXAMP 4x4 drives the subs. Two Nexo NXAmp 4x1 power amplifiers were dedicated to the mid-high compression drivers on the S12s and outfill boxes and a Nexo DTDAmp 4x07U amplifier powers the frontfill speakers. “The Nexo system at Lewisville sounds great with plenty of headroom,” says Yevoli, “The S1210s provide the precise pattern control we needed and are extremely consistent across their wide pattern. They are just what the room called for and at a good price point.”
Signal processing for the system is accomplished with a Q-Sys Core 110f fixed format DSP implemented with a DTD-IN two-channel Dante network interface. “The Q-Sys is useful for tuning and provides great control capability with PC or iOS devices,” offers Yevoli.
In line with other campus installations, a familiar Yamaha CL5 audio mixing console was installed to control audio. It was equipped with two RIO3224-D digital audio snake interfaces with Dante digital network remote I/O units. Cisco SG300-10 10-Port Layer-3 Network switches handle network connectivity. Additional FOH equipment includes an Apple iMac, Middle Atlantic racks and hardware, Furman PL-8C 15A power conditioner with an APC Smart-UPS 1500 Portable Uninterrupted power supply.
The stage inputs at Valley Creek’s Lewisville campus includes Countryman H6 omnidirectional headsets, two Shure ULXD4Q Quad Digital wireless receivers, four Shure ULXD2/KSM9 handheld transmitters, two Shure ULXD2/SM58 handheld transmitters, two ULXD1 Digital Wireless bodypack transmitters and an RF Venue Diversity Fin antenna.
Ten Roland M48 personal mixers were installed for in-ear monitors. According to Yevoli, the choice was easy because the musicians “love the way they sound.” Four Sennheiser EW300IEMG3-A wireless in-ear monitor systens and 10 Shure SE425 in-ear monitor headphones are provided for performers. Connectivity is accomplished with Roland’s S-MADI REAC MADI Bridge and a Yamaha RMIO64-D 56/64-channel Dante-MADI bridge unit. Additional network connectivity is handled by reliable Cisco SG300-10 and SG300-20 10- and 20-Port layer-network switches.
Filling in the Lighting Plan
For Valley Creek’s technology plan, lighting presents an opportunity to simplify design with familiar lighting control and filling out the roster with an appropriate number of lighting fixtures to address a basic lighting plot. At Lewisville, MA Lighting MA120120 MA onPC command wing and PC software was a good fit. In combination with the free grandMA2 onPC software, the MA onPC command wing presented a well-known and versatile control solution for Valley Creek’s volunteers at an affordable price. For increased flexibility, Yevoli added an Enttec Storm 24 Ethernet to DMX converter along with four Whirlwind custom DMX floor boxes and a Belden 24-port patch panel. “We’re very excited about the Enttec Storm 24,” says Yevoli. “For the price of a standard splitter you can create up to 24 separate universes of DMX control.”
For front lighting, Yevoli and his team relamped and installed 22 existing ETC SourceFour fixtures from Valley Creek locations and added 5 SB6-10Y-B 6-circuit SmartBar2 dimmers. To add color on stage and walls, 10 Chauvet ColorRado 1-TRI Tour RGB LED Par fixtures were installed along with 18 Elation SixBar 1000 units, three Chauvet ColorDash Par-Quad 7s, eight Chauvet Rogue R2 moving washes and six Chauvet Rogue R2 moving head spots. Moving lights are not typical at other Valley Creek campuses, so this choice represented an adjustment to their master technology plan. “Our technology blueprint is not inflexible,” says Kozen, “In fact, we expect that our plan will change over time as production needs change or when equipment is updated or needs to be changed out.”
A key lighting element at all Valley Creek campuses is the creative use of color. Past the lighting on stage, color is used to creating an environment conducive to worship. According to Yevoli, “The church often uses color to break down the barriers before and during the worship experience.” To accomplish this, the stage lighting system was augmented with 23 Chroma-Q Inspire RGBW LED pendant fixtures installed throughout the worship space. Chroma-Q fixtures employ industry standard DMX-512 control that can integrate seamlessly with the church’s DMX lighting control infrastructure. The sleek design of the Inspire fixtures features energy-efficient LED components that provide reduced maintenance and running costs.
Additional lighting equipment installed at Lewisville includes two Antari HZ-350 hazers, a Lyntec PDS-10-8 unit provides one-touch sequential system control and, for architectural control, a Doug Fleenor P10-A Preset 10 station with four ES2 Entry Station Two units.
Tools for Video
Kozen and Yevoli put great looking video as a must for Valley Creek’s master technology plan and designed for three Da-Lite 94011V Cinema Contour HDTV format (108- by 192-inch) screens carefully placed at left, right and center. “Careful planning was necessary since the space has structural supports to consider [for sightlines],” recalls Yevoli. Panasonic PT-DW750BU 7,000 Lumen WXGA DLP projectors installed with Chief VCMU universal hardware to handle the projection.
Video signals are processed by a Ross Video Carbonite+ 1 M/E video switcher operated with a Ross C1A control panel and pass through a Ross NK-3G34 34x34 3G-SDI matrix router equipped with an RCP-NKM Kameleon M Series 40-button control unit. Additional video bay equipment includes AJA HD10AMA HD/SD SDI 4-ch. analog audio embedder/disembedders and SHC-9642 SDI to HDMI converters. Yevoli is particularly pleased with the performance of the Carbonite+ switcher. “With Ross’s MiniMe functionality we can make 1 M/E switcher work like a 4 M/E switcher,” he says. “That will ultimately make for multi-screen or triple-wide projection at Lewisville simple and easy.”
Video sources include two Apple iMac 27-inch with Turbo Boost and 16GB of RAM, 512GB Flash Storage and an AMD Radeon R9 M395X graphics card. Renewed Vision’s ProPresenter software is used with the company’s Alpha Keyer and Master Control Modules. Blackmagic Design Ultrastudio 4K Thunderbolts are used to convert the iMac video signals to HD-SDI. A Hitachi Z-HD5000 studio camera equipped with a Fujinon XA20s x 8.5BRM HD lens captures the action and provides a source for basic IMAG. For recording and playback at Flower Mound and Lewisville, Video Devices PIX 270i video recorders are used that provide hardware scaling and frame rate conversion and is equipped with two Pix SSD-6 240GB SATA drives.
Beyond the Blueprint
It is important to note that there are non-technical, but essential elements to Valley Creek’s plan for expansion. Kozen has witnessed the important role that the church body plays in new campus projects. “We find that success comes when we align the hearts of our body to our vision,” he says. “When we do that, it builds faith in what God wants to do through our projects. It’s an invitation to be a part of what God is doing in the community.” An example of how much concern Valley Creek has for the community in Lewisville is that they have left part of the building construction to be completed once they know better what the community needs. “We want to be an important part of what is going on in Lewisville—to be a part of the life flow of the community, not just be there on Sunday.” As new Valley Creek campuses come online, Kozen sees more hearts aligning and that, he believes, builds faith for the next campus and the next. “Being a missional church,” he says, “is in our DNA.”
Andy McDonough is a freelance writer, photographer, musician, educator and consulting engineer based in Middletown, New Jersey. Among his favorite topics are the application of technology and music in houses of worship. He welcomes email at andymcd@comcast.net.
