Great lighting programming is built on preparation, structure, and repeatable workflow—not just creativity. Photo courtesy of Prestonwood Baptist Church.
I love lighting design. I love talking about it, writing about it, critiquing it, and teaching it. Good, effective church lighting design is hard to come by, and I am passionate about improving that situation. However, the best lighting design can be completely decimated by poor programming. How we use the design is just as important as the design itself. And in a community like ours, where we so often rely on volunteers to execute, we have to set them up for success. So, let’s talk about three best practices that will immediately improve how your service lighting is created, no matter which console brand you utilize.
Console Organization
I have a fair amount of tools in my garage. I do woodworking, auto repair, and general home improvement projects. Some of the most frustrating situations are being in the middle of a critical moment, like a glue-up for a tabletop or handling a plumbing emergency, and not being able to locate the tool you need. Equally frustrating is lying under a car trying to tell your son (or worse, your wife) where to find the 10mm open-end wrench in a toolbox with no discernible organizational structure. Apply similar scenarios 27to your tackle box, mic drawer, studio shelves, or perhaps even your lighting console.
MOST CHURCH LIGHTING PROBLEMS HAVE LESS TO DO WITH FIXTURES AND MORE TO DO WITH WORKFLOW.
Every lighting console has at least two major elements that need to be organized: groups and parameter presets. Groups are sets of fixtures that are often used together. This can be house lights, stage fronts, stage backs, etc. When creating groups, I try to think about all of the ways I might use my fixtures and create groups accordingly. For example, if I find that I oftentimes want to split up my backlights in a symmetrical grouping (not just even or odd), I’ll take the time to make groups for those so I can quickly program with them. But why would I bother taking up precious screen space with all of these groups when I know the fixture numbers? Because touching one group button is significantly faster than typing in the fixture numbers. Over time, those seconds add up. Also, you might know the fixture numbers, and you might even have them on a magic sheet next to the console (though I rarely see that these days), but why not make it crystal clear for your volunteers and other team members to find these groups and know what they do?
The same concept can be applied to parameter presets (or palettes). All of your pan/tilt looks, colors, gobos, even zoom and focus looks should be stored in readily accessible presets with which you or anyone else can quickly program. It’s amazing how much more quickly you can create a look when you can recall a gobo from the third gobo wheel and immediately size it and focus it the way you want, simply by recalling your presets.So, here are my rules for organizing groups and presets.
1.Label them accurately and sensibly.
If I’m working on someone else’s show file and I ask where the house lights are, and the answer is “Group 72”, I’m going to lose my mind.
2.Logically organize them.
Put all of your house light groups together, and arrange them in a row that might be “All House, Floor, Terrace, Balcony” from left to right. Arrange your gobo presets in the same order they are in real life on the gobo wheel.3.Create pages that assist in efficientprogramming.For example, if I have groups of moving lights, I can put those on the same page as the moving light pan/tilt presets and gobo presets. If I’m working with static LED fixtures, I’m going to have dimmer and color presets close by.
4.Bonus option - create a page of groups that mimics the layout of the rig.
If you have a console that does actual layouts, great - use them. Otherwise, use this option as a workaround.
Our rule with the Prestonwood lighting team is that anyone with a decent amount of lighting knowledge should be able to walk up to any of our consoles and be programming within a few minutes. That’s mainly for my benefit since I don’t program on a regular basis anymore, but I need to be able to jump in and help out when necessary. If the console is arranged in a way that only one person’s twisted mind can comprehend, I can’t help.
Program with Presets
Creating all of the groups and presets we talked about above takes a lot of time and effort, but it pays off with speed and efficiency. The next best practice is, as much as possible, to program cues with presets and not use raw DMX data. What I mean by this is, when creating a cue, instead of grabbing a group of lights and manually moving them into position or using the color picker to dial in a color, I want to set all parameters with presets. The reason being when I use presets to build a cue, that cue is referencing the preset. If I use raw DMX values to create the cue, that cue is referencing the DMX values that were in that one instance.
Let’s say I have a cue where three lights are illuminating a worship leader’s solo position that happens in multiple songs. Later, if the worship leader decides he wants to stand in a different spot on stage, I need to change the pan/tilt information for those three lights. If I use raw DMX information, I now have to go to every single cue where I programmed that position and fix it. However, if I used a pan/tilt preset called “WL Solo,” I can update that preset, and it will automatically be updated in every cue that uses that preset. This really becomes huge when you decide that your “Medium Blue” color needs to be a little darker blue. If you aren’t using a preset for that color, you quickly learn just how many cues you need to touch in order to update it. By the way, on some consoles, you can take this a step further by nesting presets within presets.
By programming with mostly presets instead of manual DMX data, you can program more quickly and more consistently. Which takes us to our third best practice...
Create Keystone Cues with Presets
A “keystone cue” is a cue in your playback list where the look transitions into a new element of the service. A typical list of these cues (in order) could be:
- Walk-in
- Song
- Song
- Baptism
- Welcome
- Video
- Song
- Song
- Bumper
- Sermon
- Invitation
- Walk-out
I want to create a preset for each one of these cues that includes all parameters for everything you see - basically a snapshot of the look. Every lighting console has its own way (or multiple ways) of accomplishing this. Creating these presets (I would refer to them as All Palettes, giving away my console preference) allows me to do several things.
First, I can build the base cues for an entire service in a matter of seconds. In fact, in a worst-case scenario, this rough cue list would work just fine for a typical worship service.
Second, many programmers tend to reuse cue lists from Sunday to Sunday, but this runs the risk of introducing corrupt data that is difficult to track down. Starting each week with a fresh set of cues is much safer.
Finally, by creating these keystone cue presets, you have just given your volunteers a safe place to start building cues. These presets ensure that all of your design parameters are correct, allowing your team members the creative freedom to modify colors and texture for whatever look they are trying to create.
Empower Your Team
If you’re like me, you have a lot of responsibilities when it comes to preparing for Sunday, not to mention all of the other events and issues that need your attention all week long. In my former churches, where I was the tech director, I didn’t have a lighting programmer on staff, so I was the one programming all the cues and making the creative decisions, but I couldn’t be the one running the console on Sundays. Also, I’m a control freak who didn’t think I could let go of creating the looks for the service.
I finally learned that if I put in some extra work creating the right presets and laying out the console in a way volunteers could understand, I could train them to help me achieve similar results. Give it a shot and see where it takes you.
