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Images courtesy of Prestonwood Baptist Church.
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One of the key elements of “The Gift of Christmas” is high-resolution virtual scenery through the use of LED video walls.
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Clair Brothers recently replaced the sound system in the room. Chris Schutz, audio engineer at Prestonwood says, "it’s been a game-changer for us when it comes to setting up for the Christmas production.” Highlights of the system include Roland M-48 personal monitor mixers, in concert with Studer Vista 5 M2 consoles at both FOH and monitors, plus a Studer Vista 9 broadcast mixer.
Many churches use the season of Christmas to do special programs hoping to attract those in their community needing to hear the Gospel message. But few have the opportunity to take it to the level that Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, can—and does—each December.
“We have had a Christmas production at Prestonwood for nearly 30 years,” states Worship Pastor Todd Bell. “The production has changed immensely over the years, becoming more elaborate, more creative and more technologically advanced. But the most important aspect of the production has never changed—sharing the life-transforming message of the Gospel through the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
Prestonwood's latest iteration of its Christmas show, called “The Gift of Christmas,” was in its second year last December. The church's team develops a concept for its yearly event, and then runs the same basic show for several years, freshening and updating it each year, until they feel it's time for a complete change in format.
“'The Gift of Christmas' is a two-and-a-half hour Broadway-style show in three acts,” describes Bell, who is also the executive producer of the program. “Act I is a production of secular music—all the typical Christmas pieces that people expect and enjoy. Act II features choir, singers, and orchestra—about 30 minutes of concert music.
It's upbeat, contemporary Christmas choir music with praise teams and soloists. Act III is the heart of what we do. We present the Gospel of the birth of Jesus Christ. It starts with the proclamation to Mary, and goes all the way through to the visit of the three kings. One king comes in with three live camels; another comes in on a chariot followed by zebras and alpacas. And at the end Pastor Jack Graham gives a brief presentation of the Gospel.”
One of the key elements of “The Gift of Christmas” was moving to high-resolution virtual scenery through the use of LED video walls. Behind the choir loft is an 80-foot-wide by 14-foot-high LED video wall, with a second video wall in front of the choir loft as a backdrop to the dancers and other performers.
Planning is everything
With 550 people in the choir, a full orchestra, praise bands, dancers and performers, and around 600 children in the various children's choirs, it takes a lot to plan and manage the production.
“We basically start planning the show the Monday after it closes the previous year,” Bell says. “This year we had our first team meeting around April. The entire show features custom-arranged music, so materials have to be written, arranged, and recorded. We recorded all of the tracks in advance to produce a CD of the music. Our Bradley Knight is the orchestrator/arranger for the show, and the music was recorded with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Abby Road Studios in London.”
Each year, the Prestonwood team evaluates what worked well, what they didn't like as much, what holes are present that need to be filled, and what has been present for multiple years and needs to be refreshed. They start from there and develop a new plan for the coming year.
By summer the creative planning is complete, and the detailed implementation begins with planning the technical aspects of the show and producing visual media. Rehearsals for the performers begins mid-October, and runs for six weeks.
“By mid-October we've also settled on vender selection for all the technical aspects of the show,” Bell reports. “Last year Gemini Light Sound and Video of Dallas provided all rigging, lighting and the choir video wall, and GoVision of Argyle, Texas, handled the downstage video wall. Audio is all handled in-house with our standard house systems.”
The show begins moving into the auditorium three weeks before opening night. They plan for one week of load in, one week of blocking and staging rehearsals, and two dress rehearsals before opening night.
The LED walls are the last things to load in. “They really change the look of the platform,” Bell says.
The almost $1 million production budget is funded largely through ticket sales, which range from $15-$23. In 2012, the church offered seven performances, with around 5,500 attendees for each show.
“Once the music is chosen, my team takes it and brainstorms what the backdrops could be that would match the mood and theme of the music.”
Tim Kelley
Television Producer, Prestonwood Baptist Church, Plano TX
Lighting systems
While Prestonwood has a full-time lighting designer for its regular weekly events, the time commitment for pulling off a production like “The Gift of Christmas” necessitates bringing in another lighting designer to focus on the show. Matt Webb, a freelance lighting designer with Unlimited Visibility Inc. based in New York has worked on Prestonwood's Christmas productions for several years now, but was quite familiar with the church's style even before that.
“I grew up at Prestonwood,” Webb says, “and [I] learned how to do technical production work at the church. Upon becoming an adult, I launched my freelance career, and have been in technical production ever since.”
Lighting is controlled by the church's GrandMA 2 console (MA Lighting), and utilizes practically every fixture the church owns.
“The first point of the lighting is to make sure you can see everybody, which is a challenge when there's over 500 people up there,” Webb reports. “There's a pretty significant lighting package just going into those elevation basics. It takes about 100-150 ETC SourceFours and 16 Vari-Lites just to get full stage coverage.”
A total of 170 Vari-Lite intelligent fixtures were used in the show, 30 of which are owned by the church. Gemini Light, Sound and Video provided the balance of the fixtures.
“I really love to play with the music and the beats,” says Webb. “I love to get all those percussion hits into the lighting. With the length of the show, there probably isn't a color that we don't use.”
Video drives much of the content for the show, and Webb works closely with the video production staff to make sure the lighting works with the video and does not compete with it.
“I take the video content and use lighting to grow it into the whole room,” Webb describes.
The show is also captured on video for later television broadcast; making sure the lighting works well for the cameras is just as critical as the look for the live performance.
“If you make it look good on camera, it'll look good on stage,” states Webb. “When I'm programming, I typically have a wide shot set up on a monitor in front of me. When we get into rehearsals, I have a switcher to pick from any camera angle, and am on intercom with the video team to make sure we are in sync. It's always subtle things, like using a blue that's less saturated so it doesn't blow the camera out.”
Finally, 10 followspots are used to follow the key action. “James Maddux, Prestonwood's staff lighting designer, works with the followspot operators to train them,” Webb says. “They are as good, if not better, than any of the professional followspot operators I work with throughout the year. James does a fantastic job of working with them each year.”
Video integration
The LED video wall upstage behind the choir turned out to be literally the largest challenge of the production.
“The greatest gift we receive is hearing from people who say they accepted Christ as their Lord and Savior..."
Todd Bell
Worship Pastor, Prestonwood Baptist Church, Plano, TX
“The original video vendor had a product we really liked, and initial calculations by our structural engineer indicated [that] the load on the roof structure would not be a problem,” Webb states. “But as we started the load-in for the show, it wasn't going as we anticipated, and we had concerns about the weight. Only days before the show was set to open, we realized we needed to change our plans, and called Gemini Light Sound and Video for assistance. Gemini was able to provide a solution from Elation Professional that was half the weight, and actually had a slightly higher resolution.”
A total of 420 Elation EPV762 panels were used to create the wall, with 125 panels needing to be outsourced from Phoenix-based Merstone Productions and Pacific Coast Entertainment of Huntington Beach, Calif., transported via airfreight.
“To match what we had planned, a total of 500 tiles would have been needed,” says Webb. Since the wall ended up being a different resolution, video needed to be re-rendered to match the final size of the wall, which were approximately 4,000 pixels by 700 pixels. In addition, the Mbox video servers (from Production Resource Group) needed to be reconfigured to match the new resolution of the wall.
“Gemini and Elation were great to work with, and went all-out to make this happen in the incredibly short time-frame we were facing,” explains Webb.
The downstage video wall providing a backdrop for the dancers and other performers was a Panasonic 8mm LED wall provided by GoVision.
Media production
Prestonwood's television producer, Tim Kelley, is responsible for the team that creates all the media played on the two massive screens. Having been in media ministry since he was a teenager running a video camera at his home church in Dallas, Kelley has now been part of the tech team at Prestonwood for eight years.
“The creative process for the media starts with the music,” Kelley says. “Once the music is chosen, my team takes it and brainstorms what the backdrops could be that would match the mood and theme of the music. Once the concepts have been approved, the media staff, plus a small army of freelancers, goes to work to create the media.”
As the media comes together, Kelley coordinated with Webb to ensure that the lighting will harmonize with the video content.
Audio support
On the audio side of the production, Prestonwood's house audio system is capable of handling all the needs of the production. The only thing rented is a set of sub-woofers used to replace the below-stage subs that get turned off when the stage is extended out to form the orchestra pit.
“We recently had Clair Brothers replace the sound system in the room,” states Chris Schutz, audio engineer at Prestonwood, “and it's been a game-changer for us when it comes to setting up for the Christmas production.”
Musicians get Roland M-48 personal monitor mixers to control their own mixes. Studer Vista 5 M2 consoles serve both at FOH and monitors, and a Studer Vista 9 serves as the broadcast mixer. The house sound system is comprised of Clair Brothers line arrays utilizing i218 boxes, with 15CX boxes for front-fill and CS218s for subs.
Through lots of planning and a huge team effort, Prestonwood brings “The Gift of Christmas” and the Gospel message to the greater Dallas area. Various church groups from throughout the region attend each year, and for countless people, the first introduction to the ministry of Prestonwood is through “The Gift of Christmas.”
In sync with the goal of its Christmas production, Prestonwood's mission statement is “to glorify God by introducing Jesus Christ as Lord to as many people as possible and to develop them in Christian living using the most effective means to impact the world, making a positive difference in this generation.”
“The greatest gift we receive is hearing from people who say they accepted Christ as their Lord and Savior because ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told' came to life for them in ‘The Gift of Christmas,'” Bell closes.
