LOVE OKC STUDENT CONFERENCE DESIGN
We are always excited to to work with the amazing Stephen Kramer and his team at North Church in Oklahoma City. We recently provide gear for Love OKC 2015 and got a chance to visit with Stephen prior to the final night. We asked the Stephen about the vision for this years event. Check out what he had to say about Love OKC.
“The design for LOVE OKC Student Conference started where everything within our organization and church starts, vision. The whole vision of this conference is to be an example of God’s light to this world through students and their hands. LOVE OKC Student Conference is the combination of mission work and passionate worship (pouring out love and being filled up with the Holy Spirit)
We always want to start our conference off with a distinct message and vision for the week through an opener. This year we decided to use a special from our friends at Church On The Move called “There is a Light.” Video
In the planning of the opener, the idea of light “exploding” from a central area kept coming up. Ideas of something that generated the light, ideas of reflecting light, etc. At that point, the example of a Miranda Lambert’s Concert came up from Bandit Lites Instagram, mirror balls being hit from all directions with spots. I then had multiple conversations with Steve and Pete at Integrity Lighting regarding equipment needed to pull of this special moment at the beginning of our conference. One thing that kept coming up was how to spend the budget wisely. I never want to spend money on fixtures/lights that we are only going to get one use out of in a weeklong conference. Therefore we came up with a rig of 24 Martin MH3’s to go along with their 48” Mirror Ball, allowing us to get a tight beam for spotting the Mirror ball and also supplying another dimension of beam to our stage set.
The plan the whole time was to light the Mirror ball from all directions, upstage floor, all stage trusses, front side wings, and front wash bar(Thus needing 24 of them). This made reusing the fixtures for other moments in the experience hard. So after load in we decided to test some things out. We set the ball in the middle of our room, put a few of the fixtures on the stage floor and shot them at the ball. I figured out that if I aimed the beams on the outside of the ball, it would reflect 150° – 170° off the mirror ball. From there we decided to use all the fixtures behind the mirror ball, allowing us to use the fixtures alongside the rest of our backlit set. Having the sharpy style/tight beam fixture allowed us to hit the ball without any bleed over, and also allowed use to adjust the look of the beams that were being reflected. The tighter the fixture, the tighter the reflected beam.
At the end of the conference we wanted to end with a dance party to celebrate all that had happened that week. Our creative team put together a video of before and after pictures of the house that were painted during the week. We wanted to create a fun “Club” / “DJ” feel environment with the song “The Nights” by Avicii. We consulted again with Integrity and landed on the idea of using 4 Antari W715 Fog Jets to simulate the dynamic of CO2 jets, with the combination of the Mirror ball, the Martin MH3’s and the Antari Jets, the Experiences at LOVE OKC Student Conference are still being talked about among our church today.”
