As your production ministry grows and you gain the ability to do more advanced elements in your services, there becomes a need (or at least a benefit) to considering cross-discipline integration. It you’re at the point where you can do color washes on your stage, architectural elements and possibly even your house seating area, and are using video up front to display lyrics and video, coordinating your lighting design with the use of your video can add a new dimension of aesthetics to your worship environment.
Color coordination
The most common form of integration is to coordinate the colors being used to wash your stage or platform with the colors used in your video projection. Extending the colors in the background video or images that are being used with song lyrics or sermon slides onto the stage and even out into the house gives a nice, coordinated feel to the environment. Alternatively, using complementary colors can help your video projection pop off the stage and stand out more. Which way you go is completely up to your church’s sense of aesthetics.
Because colors can vary between different display systems and different lighting fixtures, you’ll want to do your color matching actually in the room with the backgrounds you’re trying to match on your displays. You can’t simply look at the RGB values in a given image and enter those RGB values into your lighting system for your color-changing fixtures—the chance of these actually matching is pretty close to zero. Only looking at the colors in person will enable you to get an exact match in color, saturation and brightness between your various fixtures and what’s on your displays.
Thinking ahead
To make things easier in the future, if you tend to reuse a lot of the same backgrounds, when you get colors set that match them, define some presets in your lighting console for those backgrounds so they can easily be recalled in the future. This will also facilitate programming your lighting offline without having to guess at what colors will match a given background.
If you’re going to go down this road, it’s important to coordinate lighting changes with changes on your video screens. Ideally, you’d be set up to have the lighting controller trigger a video background change at the same time the lighting changes. However, this can involve more costly video equipment. You can, however, simply coordinate lighting and video changes manually through an intercom or simply by positioning those positions next to each other in the tech booth.
This is just another small tip on how to augment the look of your services.
