DALLAS – Easter is a time of new beginnings. This was manifested quite clearly at The Heights Baptist Church in Richardson, Texas, this year, not just in its uplifting service and sermon, but also in its lighting system, which entered a new era of color rendering with the addition of almost 40 CHAUVET Professional LED fixtures.

“Our church had a very beautiful video created for its traditional and contemporary services,” said Bobby Dennis, the Technical Director at the well-known house of worship. “The video featured a father and son talking about the colors they encounter on a daily basis and how they relate to the message of Easter, with red for the cross and white for the resurrection and things of that nature.”

With color playing such a key role in the church’s Easter services, Dennis believed that the time had come to upgrade his lighting rig. “We had a good system in place with fixtures like the Rogue RH1 Hybrid that we used to create a wide variety of looks,” he said. “However, with Easter approaching, we felt that we should replace our old scrollers with high performing LED fixtures that could saturate our stage with rich colors. This was a move we were going to make anyway, but Easter definitely served as a catalyst. It was the perfect time for us to have a fresh, new start with color.”

In the weeks leading up to Easter, Dennis added 14 COLORado Batten 72 Tour fixtures, six COLORdash Par-Quad 18s, and six COLORado 1-Quad Zoom Tours.  He plans to add two more Par-Quad 18s and two more 1-Quad Zoom Tours by summer.

“Color has always been important to lighting services, especially when you have a large stage and worship area as we do,” said Dennis. “This was always true, even in the pre-LED days, but the new technology gives us so many more ways to change and mix colors. It opens a new world of possibilities. Those of us who light worship areas have to think more in terms of this new technology, because it allows us to do so much more with color, to change the worship environment and evoke different feelings.  With the additions we made for Easter — now a permanent part of our lighting palette – we’re able to offer more vivid color saturation, and definitely more flexibility in color options than we could with the previous conventional scrollers.”

Dennis saturated his Easter services stage with color by floor mounting his COLORado Battens on vertical pipes to deliver light bar looks during various scenes. “These are amazing fixtures with incredible output,” he said. “We created very deep looks with them at different points, then during the singing of actual worship songs, we ran these at only two percent, because they are so bright. Of course we turned the level up for our ‘colors video’ piece.”

Also adding color to the Easter services were the COLORdash Par-Quad 18 fixtures, which were mounted above the stage for general washing.  Dennis also mounted the COLORado 1-Quad Zoom Tours above each of the main “leader” positions. He zoomed these fixtures in tightly during songs for down-fill position marks. Then, during the “colors video,” the zoom was opened to wash the area in different hues.

Complementing the rich colors were some textured gobo patterns projected on the stage wall with four of the Rogue RH1 Hybrids in the church’s rig. Dennis also had black curtains positioned over different architectural elements for the Easter services.

“We used the curtains to add to the dramatic effect of the look we were creating,” he said. “There was quite a bit of extra work that went into making our Easter services more memorable. Easter may be over, but we still have our new color rendering fixtures, so we’ll be able to create many more special looks throughout the year.”