Sanctuary Lighting

The church Sanctuary is certainly a main focal point of the church. It is where sunday worship is held along with many lessons and teaching times.  Lighting is not something many people think about (nor is the sound system) unless something goes wrong that is;)

A little history:
Best we can tell the sanctuary was originally lit only by the chandeleir.   It was pretty common back then as it probably followed even older designs for candles or oil lamps.  The light shines up from the chandeleir and reflects off the ceiling down to the room below (indirect lighting).  At some point probably a couple decades before we got the church CAN lights facing down were added which gave usable light for the congregation.

As with most areas of knowledge these days lighting design can be a life-long profession... but our needs are relatively simple.  We want light for the audience, light for the stage, and the ability to turn down the lights for videos and such.  Some relevant terms to understand are:
- Lumens: light a device emits
- Candlepower: light measured at area used
- Key: principal light that shines on subject
- Fill: secondary light at angle to remove shadows
- Backlight: light that separates subject from background

When we got the building the lighting situation was that we had the chandeleir lights, and the can lights.  As a church we do more than have readings and sermons on stage so we wanted the stage to be lit more directly.  To fix this an electrician added some flood lights to the chandeleir facing directly at the stage.  This was better than nothing but doing some simple reading online about stage lighting shows that you never want to shine light directly towards a subject.  Not only does this blind the person but it created shadows and prevents the person from looking natural.

A full theater often has 100s of lights to focus on different areas with different colors to highlight a variety of aspects of a performance and skin tone.  While there are occasions where we have plays or the like we don't really need a full lighting grid or lighting bar.  The basic two or three point lighting will be adequate for us.  Two point lighting uses a Key and Fill to lighten an area with backlight added for three point lighting.

So our first step was to add a Key and Fill light for the stage.  We did this by adding wiring in the ceiling and pulling lights up from below through a small hole in the ceiling.  Using PAR56 light fixtures (white cases to match the ceiling) we were able to angle the lights at angles towards the stage.  Keeping the lights to the ceiling did limit us a bit as to getting the angle we wanted but we still were much better than the prior setup.   We did notice that with one light fixture on each side we have a somewhat small 'sweet spot' in the center of the stage and singers on the sides are a bit in the shadows.  Our next step will be to double up the key and fill lights to create a wider 'sweet spot'.  We may also add some backlights from where the trim is above and behind the front of the stage.

 

 

For the chandeleir we replaced its lights with CFL bulbs mostly because they are cheaper.  The original bulbs were incadecent which we replaced with halogen.  We switched to the CFL's which weren't as bright as halogens and don't dim... but since the usable light is reflected off the ceiling by the time it gets to the pews it only shows up as 5 footcandles instead of the desired 20.  So at this point the chandeleir primarily just lights up the ceiling and the chandeleir itself being more of an accent light.

Along with adding fixtures we moved and changed the lighting controls.  We had been using the common Z-Wave control interface for turning the lights on and off but it proved to be rather inconsistent.  We decided to switch to DMX which is very commonly used by DJ light setups as well as large theaters and such.  While we could have bought special DMX light dimmers Tony opted to do a more DIY approach modifying common light dimmers and using an arduino to take the lighting commands to control the dimmers and relays.  With this custom setup  he was able to move all the dimmers from the hallway behind the stage that looked like this:

And replaced it with a custom set of push buttons here:

All the dimmers were moved to the bottom of the stairs above one of the circuit breaker panels to be later hidden inside a nice box.

This is much more out of view.  Also the low voltage control (arduino and relays) is inside the old organ room.

This is also where to go to turn the chandeleir on manually if the control setup is bugs out.  The new setup has worked much better and allows for much easier future expansion and modification.  We can control the lights from the sound board now with a common DMX controller (Obey 10).

With the exception of one of the bulbs blowing out pre-maturely (and taking its dimmer with it) the system has worked great.  Much more reliable and professional than the old Z-Wave...

Thanks to Mike and Tony for making this improvement (especially Tony;)