Let’s talk a bit about how you can structure your approach to lighting your services. It's key to have an approach that will help balance the reproducibility of using lighting cues with the ability to be flexible for last-minute changes in your service execution. Giving credit where credit is due, this is inspired by a conversation with my friend John Weygandt, the lighting designer at Cherry Hills Community Church in Denver.
If you already light your services completely through busking (running your lighting manually), this won’t be of much help to you. But if you’re like my church where we primarily handle lighting through one cue list, it may give you some ideas that will help you be prepared for those moments when the service doesn’t proceed as planned.
Instead of having one monolithic cue list, consider structuring your lighting such that you have multiple cue lists that handle different aspects of the service.
Instead of having one monolithic cue list, consider structuring your lighting such that you have multiple cue lists that handle different aspects of the service. This can take a variety of forms. In the case of where your basic service structure doesn’t change but perhaps what changes is exactly where your vocalists will stand, or which vocalist might be leading, one could create a primary cue list for each song to set stage wash and accent lighting, and other cue lists or submasters for your various areas of key lighting. Perhaps what songs will be used is left up to how the service is actually flowing, and you don’t know what song will happen when. You can break out songs into different cue lists and cross feed between the cue lists as you progress from one song to another, and have your main key lighting areas be broken out into their own cue lists, as well.
Other scenarios
If you have an actual lighting console, or software with fader wings, you can assign each item to a different fader. How far you can go with this will depend on your hardware; the more physical faders your system has, the more flexible you can be. John [Weygandt] describes how he built up a library of cue lists, one for each song they typically use. For a given service, he’d be provided a list of likely songs they would use, and he’d assign the cue lists for these songs each to its own playback fader. For key lighting areas, he had a cue list for each primary area, each assigned to its own fader, where the first cue would bring up the back light for that area, the second cue would add in the front lighting, and the third cue would add in more fill lighting for that area. This enables him to quickly pick a look for each area by how many times he presses the "Go" button for that cue list.
A combination of approaches like this enables you to respond to song changes quickly, even while the service is underway. It’s more work for the LD during the service, but enables them to respond in a few moments to a change in song order--instead of the manu minutes it might take to reprogram a linear monolithic cue list.
