San Antonio, TX, November, 2015 - Impact Youth Camp is a two-week long church retreat that attracts high school and middle school students from churches from all over Texas. Over 1200 students attend, participating in group seminars, praise and worship.
The organisers of the event turned to DiTech AV of El Campo, TX to handle the lighting, audio and video design and production — and powerful fixtures from PR Lighting formed a major part of the lighting inventory.
The production has grown substantially since Paul Guthrie, owner of DiTech AV became involved with the event 10 years ago. This year they exceeded expectations and challenged themselves with a design that departed from anything they had done in the past.
Guthrie worked with his LD Dan Brunson to conceive a unique design. With the stage being so large, the biggest challenge was creating an intimate feel to the space, without losing its grandeur. Together they came up with the solution to frame the stage with Dicolor LED video panels and fill in the spaces with six pieces of stick truss.
“The clarity was amazing,” says Guthrie. “It looked so much better than any projection we have used in the past.”
Lighting played an equally important role in the stage design. Guthrie used a total of 32 fixtures from PR Lighting and Mega-Lite combined — led by eight PR Lighting XR 300 Beam, with super concentrated parallel beams, which provided high output and variable gobo effects. Says Guthrie, “They looked incredible and allowed us to use them in several different ways.”
In addition, 12 tiny PR Lighting XLED 3007 fixtures (housing seven 20W 4-in-1 RGBW LEDs) and six Mega-Lite Axis QD7 fixtures provided colour washing and eye candy effects with their pixel control capabilities.
Paul Guthrie, in particular, made use of the XLED 3007 infinite pan and tilt and built-in W-DMX. “They are so fast and super versatile; they’re a great addition to our toolkit,” he says. The Enlighten ONE Console with four universes provided the lighting control.
Guthrie utilised two RGBlink VSP198S switcher/scalers and one RGBlink Driver to programme the walls. These products, along with support from Mega Systems, Inc., made this kind of set up easy to configure.
Throughout the two weeks of the camp, Guthrie received numerous compliments from the youth pastors and students. In fact, he heard many say that the lighting and video painting the picture of the gospel had helped them to focus more on worship. It was so successful for DiTech AV that several of the youth pastors booked them for upcoming events at their churches throughout Texas.
