Chauvet transforms services at Life Challenge church
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The leaders of Life Challenge United Pentecostal Church weren’t trying to duplicate a famous house of worship when they opened their new campus on the city’s Grandview Avenue earlier this year, but they did want to emulate best practices from around the world, which is why they opted to add more colour to their stage and sanctuary lighting.
“Colour rendering has come a long way since our church last installed a lighting system,” said Gabriel Loera, the technical director of Life Challenge. “We saw how much it enhanced services at other churches, and we wanted to have that in our new facility too.”
Loera helped bring this capability to the church’s new auditorium by including a collection of Chauvet Professional Ovation, Maverick and COLORado fixtures in its lighting system. The LED luminaires, which were added to the existing fixtures brought over from the church’s previous facility, include four Ovation F-915FC Fresnels, eight Ovation E-910FC ellipsoidals, three Maverick MK1 Spots and six Colorado 1 Solo wash lights.
“We added the Chauvet gear to our old house lights, which were not colour changing,” says Loera. “This was done for budgetary reasons. It was more cost-friendly to keep the old lights and add the new units to create a better worship environment.”
Life Challenge uses IMAG during services, and the church tech team wanted to see how the new colour rendering fixtures would work with video, according to Loera. “We wanted to make sure the new colour would not affect video,” he said. “In reality, the new lights only made things look more inviting in a live environment; they looked better on video too. Their natural white colour is superior to what we had before.”
Loera hung the four Ovation F-915FC Fresnels in his rig over the area just in front of the middle section of pews, positioning two of the units to the left of centre and two right of centre. Utilising the motorized zoom and wide (30° - 85°) field angle of these fixtures, he is able to move from tight coverage areas to bathing the entire audience in colour.
“From where I have the Fresnels positioned, I can cover any area of the church with only four units,” says Loera. “I can dial in and focus on a specific section, and I can use the RGBAL colour mixing system to get any colour I want. So, this gives me a lot of flexibility to reflect our services in light.”
(Jim Evans)
