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“They wanted to go low-power—meaning LED—for their house lighting, LED stage lights, lots of color for the stage and plenty of effects lighting for their productions," says Duke DeJong, church relations director for CCI Solutions in Olympia, Wash.
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From a design standpoint, church officials wanted the truss to be able to disappear, according to Duke DeJong, church relations manager at CCI Solutions. This issue was resolved by painting the ceiling a dark color and using black truss.
When a house of worship wants to upgrade its lighting and video systems, it's not enough simply to buy state-of-the-art fixtures, screens and projectors—the church must also make sure it has the necessary infrastructure in place to support the new gear. Chicago Tabernacle, founded in 2002 on the city's north side, recently faced this challenge when it set out to remodel its 300-seat main sanctuary.
In keeping with a growing trend, this Windy City congregation uses its auditorium for a variety of different purposes, including Sunday worship services, youth services, conferences, music concerts and full-scale theatrical performances such as an annual Easter production. Thus, its new lighting setup had to provide the versatility to handle a wide range of illumination needs.
“The church had a lot of ideas coming in about what they wanted to do,” says Duke DeJong, church relations director for CCI Solutions in Olympia, Wash., designer and installer of Chicago Tabernacle's new lighting and video system. “They wanted to go low-power—meaning LED—for their house lighting, LED stage lights, lots of color for the stage and plenty of effects lighting for their productions.” While the church's lighting needs for Sunday services are pretty basic, their productions and other special events “have much higher demands, including the need for lots of color, spotlighting actors/actresses and painting the air with light and broken up beams. They also needed to be able to hang lights throughout the room to cover different parts of the room and at different angles, necessitating adding lighting positions throughout.”
Yet the church had “almost nowhere to hang all the new house lights, stage lights and projectors they wanted,” DeJong reports. Adding to this challenge was the fact that church officials wanted any rigging structure that was built to be very discreet and unobtrusive.
CCI met these requirements by creating a nearly 50-foot long and 30-foot, 4-inch wide ceiling-mounted infrastructure out of medium-duty box truss supplied by Dura Truss from Global Truss America. Before deciding to build the overhead truss structure, “we looked at a number of options,” DeJong says, “but there was limited placement of rigging support so we knew whatever we used would have to work over long distances with minimal rigging points.” Another factor that favored using truss was that the church liked the way it looked.
Still, from a design standpoint, church officials wanted the truss to be able to disappear, according to DeJong. This issue was resolved by painting the ceiling a dark color and using black truss. Although it extends nearly the entire length of the room, the grid-like Dura Truss structure is subtle and inconspicuous, yet it provides an ample number of flexible mounting positions for house lights, stage lights, special effects and video projectors.
The truss structure in Chicago Tabernacle's auditorium is anchored by two parallel 49-foot, 2/1/2-inch truss segments that run almost the entire length of the room from the stage on back. Each of these segments consists of three 5-meter truss pieces. “Basically each of the room's two seating sections is split in two by a long, overhanging segment of truss,” explains DeJong. “Not only did these two truss segments provide rigging points from down stage to back of house, but because of their positioning they additionally provided ideal rigging locations for the LED house lights.”
Running perpendicular to the two 49-foot, 2/1/2-inch length-wise truss sections are three 30-foot, 4-inch cross sections of truss. Constructed from a mixture of 1.5- to 3-meter truss pieces, the three cross segments provide down stage lighting positions, mid-house lighting and projector positions, and back of house lighting positions. They hold weight loads of 650, 800, and 289 pounds respectively, easily supporting the church's lighting and video gear.
While Dura Truss box trussing provided the answer to Chicago Tabernacle's rigging needs, lighting from the truss supplier's sister company Elation Professional was reportedly key in helping the church meet its wide spectrum of illumination demands. One of the primary lighting fixtures chosen by CCI was Elation's Platinum Spot 5R Pro, a versatile hybrid spot/wash moving head that utilizes the new Philips MSD Platinum 5R lamp. Although extremely compact and energy efficient, the Platinum Spot 5R Pro is reportedly packed with professional design features that allow it to serve a variety of applications, including a CMY color mixing system, variable 11-degree to 42-degree zoom, eight dichroic colors, 22 gobos, a 3-facet rotating prism, motorized iris, variable frost filter (for hybrid wash effect), dimming, strobe and more.
“The Elation Platinum Spot 5R Pro has a fantastic combination of features at a great price,” says DeJong. “As a lighting designer, my top features are color mixing, zoom and having plenty of gobos available. The Platinum Spot 5R Pro has those key features plus all of the other standard features at a price that's hard to beat.”
