Walnut Hill church puts faith in grandMA3
- Details
Creative lighting senior intern Jonathan Martin, who designs, programmes, and operates lighting for most of Bethel’s worship service events, helped guide the team’s decision to purchase a grandMA3, backed by Walnut Hill’s production director, Christopher Ellington.
Jonathan explained how lighting was high on the agenda when the decision came to up the production stakes. “We kept coming back to grandMA3, which had the perfect combination of price point and hardware feature set,” he explained, whilst Christopher also underlined the importance of investing in lighting both for now and the future, and co-ordinated much of the logistical work involved in making the transition to MA.
The console is running approximately 40 conventional fixtures, 16 moving lights and 42 custom RGB pixel tubes, plus some LED PARs and MR-16 blinders, with the pixel tubes used extensively for creative lighting and to provide illuminated scenic elements, either hung from roof trusses or floor mounted where it also assists in creating visual textures and depth of field for the streamed events.
As well as lighting the stage, some of the moving lights highlight the 750-seat Bethel auditorium and are utilised for key lighting / specials, while the warmth and glow of the blinders produces classic fade-effects and contrast to the cool precision of the LEDs. There are 25 DMX universes and around 4000 parameters running from the grandMA3, which the entire production staff love.
Jonathan uses a combination of Phasers and MAtricks extensively in his programming, which is a “favourite” method for creating very complex lighting looks extremely fast, especially effective when utilising the pixel tubes.
He finds Phasers generally very easy and straightforward to use. “It’s a whole new way of thinking about effects, especially when working with large amounts of fixtures / pixels.” This console is also Jonathan’s first major grandMA experience.
“I had always been aware that grandMA consoles were an industry standard for high-level live productions,” he says, however it was when Walnut Hill borrowed an MA onPC command wing from Adam Biscow, production designer at Strictly FX, for their 2019 Christmas Eve services, that their own MA journey truly began.
“Personally, I found it very easy to transition from grandMA2 to grandMA3 and it felt like much of the workflow was improved,” commented Jonathan, who enjoys working on a console that can be “moulded to the differing programming needs of myself and our team of volunteers which has been exceptionally valuable.”
