Lighting the Room At Summit

Lighting was the last major piece Lambda designed and installed for Summit Church earlier this year. It made an incredible visual difference and impact to their main room. It was so much fun to see this design come to life and how incredible it looked. 
For a more in-depth case study, we asked Brad Helzer, our main systems schematics designer, to write a little about what building the lighting system for Summit looked like:

“Summit Church was such a great project to work on. It presented unique challenges and a need for a fresh update in their look. The first thing I noticed when looking at the room for Summit is how wide it was. I imagine all the church attendees also got the feeling they were far away from the people on the other side of the room due to the width. So, to mitigate some of that width in the room I wanted to design something that had a central focus and moved outward from the stage toward the audience. With this in mind, we chose to use truss flown from the ceiling on a raked angle to create the sense of height and a dynamic depth for lighting fixtures to be hung from.

​We like to call this our happy accident. Where the initial design was meant to have simple strut to hang the lights from, we wanted to see what truss looked like. As soon as we saw the truss in the drawn design, we knew it was a yes! The truss really gave the room an extra element of aesthetics and enhanced bringing the focus of the room back to the stage.

Previous to the Lambda AV install, the church was “stage set” heavy, but we wanted to help them move in a direction of using lighting and the placement of fixtures as their stage design instead of building a

new backdrop whenever they needed a stage refresh. We used negative space and an abundance of fixtures to accomplish this. They now have a huge inventory of lighting to choose from and countless looks that can be created with the moving heads and LEDs that we installed. Overall, this design was refreshing to the congregation and moved them forward in the vision of their church and what they are accomplishing.”

Lighting was a team effort for Lambda, with input from multiple design experts. Scott Lebeau, an incredible lighting effects designer, took the lighting vision from Brad and put it into a feasible blueprint to bring it to life for Summit. Scott directed the install of the lights and made sure that they were all hung precisely to create a beautiful look for the stage.

“I had the honor with helping Lambda AV with the install of lighting for Summit Church. The first major upgrade for them was to their house lights. The house lighting upgrade was taken from basic house lighting to a full RGBW fixture made by ChromaQ. These lights allowed us to create an environment throughout the entire room, and with the added ability for the colors to match the stage environment. Another benefit of these house lights was they’re silky smooth dimming curve, from one to one hundred percent.  

The second major upgrade to the lighting structure came from the front wash. These lights, along with all the rest for the project, came from our friends at Zebra Productions! This was taken from conventional Lekos to an LED engine based Leko. These were great addition for the front wash for a few reasons. First, the regular lamp maintenance has now been eliminated since the LED engine is rated to last 20,000 plus hours. Secondly, power consumption has been dropped by 80 percent. What was once a 750-watt lamp is now a 90-watt LED engine putting out the same amount of light to the stage. So, between lamp cost and power savings these lights are paying for themselves quickly.
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​The last upgrade Summit requested from Lambda AV was a new stage design. This addition was key to the environment of their room and stage. With this design we added 20 static wash fixtures that are used for down lighting of the stage wings. We then added 12 moving LED washes that allowed us to create unique looks from the center of the rig as well as the floor. The last piece of this stage design was 10 profiles. The profiles bring a wonderful amount of texturing to the stage design and environment. With several Gobo and color options, this allowed us to design visually beautiful pieces of art creating an emotional experience during the services.”

Lambda couldn’t be more pleased with how the lighting at Summit turned out! It created a fresh new look for the church, one that will last for years to come. ​

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