Images courtesy of Elevation Church Asheville, Asheville, N.C.
Every Sunday at 5 a.m., a volunteer team led by Elevation Church Production Director Marshall Northcutt arrives at Asheville High School in Asheville, N.C. Their mission: To transform the school auditorium into a modern house of worship, complete with attention-grabbing audio, video, and lighting effects. Add the fact that this satellite campus and 17 others have to connect to Elevation Church’s production center in Ballantyne, N.C., to share Pastor Steven Furtick’s sermon live, and there’s lots of work to be done in Asheville each and every Sunday morning.
"After the second service ends around 1 p.m., we tear it all down, put the equipment in a storage room onsite, and get ready to do it all again next week. We try to be out of there by 2:30.” Justin Whisnant, AVL Support Manager, Elevation Church, Asheville, N.C.
“We start with a blank canvas and set up all the gear,” says Justin Whisnant, Elevation Church’s AVL support manager. “By 8 a.m., we’re ready to do a live run-through with everyone onsite, including the local church band. We then do services at 9:30 and 11:30 a.m. After the second service ends around 1 p.m., we tear it all down, put the equipment in a storage room onsite, and get ready to do it all again next week. We try to be out of there by 2:30.” (The same set-up/take-down routine also occurs every Sunday at many of Elevation Church’s other satellite campuses in the United States and Toronto, Canada.)
To make this happen smoothly, Elevation Church has taken pains to select AVL equipment that delivers professional results in easy-to-deploy packages.
To make this happen smoothly, Elevation Church has taken pains to select AVL equipment that delivers professional results in easy-to-deploy packages. It is also careful to balance performance against price, to get the best value for the church’s AVL dollar. Here’s how they do it.
Creating compelling lighting
According to Whisnant, the Asheville High School Auditorium’s stage is equipped with sufficient lighting to illuminate campus pastor Brennan Gaddis and other speakers, the church’s live band and singers, and anyone else who might be taking part in Sunday services. The task for the Elevation Church technical crew is to install scenic lighting to provide visual impact to the audience.
To this end, every Sunday the crew installs 10-12 Elation Pixel Bars on the auditorium stage. Faced towards the congregation, the Pixel Bars’ 3-in-1 SMD LEDs can produce 16.7 million colors with 8 bits per color; at 850 NITs with a 2000Hz refresh rate. These bars are managed by an Elation Pixel Driver 4000 control unit.
... every Sunday the crew installs 10-12 Elation Pixel Bars on the auditorium stage. Faced towards the congregation, the Pixel Bars’ 3-in-1 SMD LEDs can produce 16.7 million colors with 8 bits per color....
“We also have 10 Martin RUSH PAR 2 RGBW Zooms and eight Martin RUSH MH6 Washs,” says Whisnant. This provides lots of pulsing, moving color to drive the on-stage presentations and fire up the viewers.
Video power
Video is an integral part of the Elevation Church Asheville Sunday service; both to display the live sermons of Pastor Furtick from the Ballantyne broadcast facility, and to show camera shots and video playbacks locally.
To do this, Elevation Church Asheville (and the other satellite campuses) uses a Ross Video Carbonite Black Solo production switcher, and a Grass Valley T2 digital disk unit for playback and recording. “For routers, we use an AJA KUMO3232,” Whisnant says.
Digital video is captured by a locked-down camera mounted at the back of the Asheville auditorium (JVC GY-HM180). Asheville sends its locked-down camera shot with embedded audio via HaivisonMakitoX encoder. Video from Ballantyne to Asheville is sent via Living As One.
All video seen inside the Asheville auditorium is projected on an AV Stumpfl 16:9 projection screen.(screen size is 12’7”x7’4”), with the video coming from a Panasonic PT-Dw6300US projector.
Great sound
Audio is a top priority for any house of worship. At the Elevation Church in Asheville, the team uses a Behringer X32 digital audio console to mix inputs from speakers, singers, and the church band.
This audio is captured using the Shure QLX-D wireless microphone system with Shure SM58s and SE V7 handheld mics. (A few mics on site are hardwired.) For headset wireless microphones, the church employs Sennheiser ew 300 series G3s. Meanwhile, for in-ear audio monitoring, the team relies on Shure PSM 900s.
To deliver reliable sound reinforcement, Elevation Asheville uses eight D&B T10 loudspeakers and two D&B B2 subwoofers flanking the stage. “Right now we use four T10s and one B2 per side,” Whisnant notes.
Finally, intercom communications among the eight-person Elevation Church audio crew (Northcutt and seven volunteers), as well as between this location and the other church campuses, are supported by a Clear-Com MS-702 two-channel digital partyline base station, connected to Clear-Com RS-701 wireless beltpacks. If he service lineup needs to change on the fly, the crews are able to sort things out in real-time, Whisnant reports.
Don’t move too fast
With such a tight set-up/tear-down schedule every Sunday, it makes sense for Elevation Church’s Asheville crew to move as fast as they reasonably can. However, since volunteers make up most of the technical crew, the church is careful not to push them too hard.
“You can run into issues from people being too quick in their set-up and dropping something,” says Whisnant. “To avoid this, we try to teach them the easiest and most efficient way to set things up. But we also urge them to be aware of what they are handling, and how expensive it can be.”
Despite the tight timeline, Elevation Church Asheville always manages to reach its set-up and tear-down goals. This is a testament to the church’s adept management, smart AVL equipment choices, and training and supervision of its volunteers.
