Christmas Music Celebration

This weekend we celebrated Christmas in music. There was an amazing diversity in worship as our traditional services featured the annual choir cantata with an orchestra and the modern services featured our praise band, the story of Christmas told through Isaiah in video, lighting and architectural projection.

I'm incredibly impressed with how well all of the teams worked to accomplish such a great weekend of worship. The transition between our 8:20 traditional service (the top photo) and the modern service at 9:45 was seamless. The orchestra/choir  moved quickly and were very helpful in making things run smoothly. Once the band set up and we powered up the lights/projectors, and were ready for worship. The experience in our two modern services was very different (lower photo from Saturday night). The transition back for the cantata at 11:00 was just as smooth.

More info about the modern worship:
We've done lights and projection in our sanctuary for special services in the past (Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, etc) but never a setup this elaborate for the weekend. You can see in the photos a truss on each side of the platform holding three LED par cans, a projector, and an LED moving wash fixture; at the back of the room we mounted a second set of moving heads. This is the closest setup to what we do at Green Room on the MSU campus we've ever had in the main sanctuary.

The total visual setup involved 10 LED light fixtures, five projectors, three Macs, ProPresenter, a TripleHead2Go, and our Chamsys MagicQ light rig. All of the imagery on the walls/screens came from either Awake Images or Shift Worship. Most of it was still, but we did throw in one snowy loop background with no front light for one of the songs.

All of this was possible because of an amazing group of people, most of whom choose to serve on the tech/worship teams. Zak posted info about the modern worship music (the Isaiah videos should be posted soon too).