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There are two basic approaches to running lighting for an event like a worship service: cueing and busking. Each has its advantages and disadvantages.
Cueing
Cueing is the process of pre-recording all the lighting changes in your service, in the order in which they will be used. This includes not merely lighting levels but also pan and tilt of intelligent fixtures; the color of the light; and effects like gobo (pattern) selection; the timing assigned to the cue, etc…. Once programmed, the cues are run by simply pressing a “go” button on the console or software.
The key to success is to think through your style of service and decide what approach to lighting your services and events makes the most sense for your church, equipment, and lighting talent pool.
Busking
Busking is the process of running a show mostly manually. Specific “looks” may be pre-programmed and assigned to faders on the console, and the lighting system operator changes the lighting based on what’s happening on stage and amongst the audience. How much is programmed into each pre-programmed look is up to the programmer—it may include entire scenes with lighting intensities, colors, and special effects from moving lights; or the position of lights might be programmed separately from colors, intensities, and effects so that these different attributes can be combined on the fly.
Advantages & disadvantages
The advantages of programming cues for your event is that everything is exactly reproducible each time you do the event. It also lets someone who is more familiar with a possibly complicated lighting system program cues earlier in the week and let someone else who wants to help, but doesn’t have the knowledge or time necessary to program the lighting system, to still run the cues for the event. The challenges of cueing the lights is if something happens that’s unexpected, it can be slow or difficult to change the lighting on the fly--especially if you use the staffing model where the person running the cues doesn’t necessarily know how to do the programming. Having some emergency “fall back” basic looks available to quickly bring up in case of emergencies is a good idea.
Having some emergency “fall back” basic looks available to quickly bring up in case of emergencies is a good idea.
Busking enables you to be far more reactive to what’s going on, as opposed to running someone’s educated guess at what would work for each moment in the show. You are already planning on running much of the show manually, so responding to something unexpected is quicker and easier. And taking a different approach if the mood of one service differs from the next is also easy to accomplish. Perhaps the congregation is typically far more energetic at the second service on Sunday than at the first. Someone busking the service can respond to that, bringing up the energy level in the lighting to match the extra energy in the congregation. The downside is that you may not get the same results at each service if that’s what you want, and busking takes a higher level of skill and familiarity with the lighting console.
A bit of both?
There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods, and it’s also possible to do a hybrid of the two, where many components are cued, but other lights (such as front lighting on vocalists and speakers) can be run via busking. The key to success is to think through your style of service and decide what approach to lighting your services and events makes the most sense for your church, equipment, and lighting talent pool.
