Posts tagged ‘worship interactives’

Holy Week Journey, prep

This past Sunday, immediately following our third service, an army of volunteers showed up to help begin the set up of our multi-room Holy Week Journey. It was amazing. When we created this experience the first time, we spent quite a bit of time on advance planning. But there was still much inventing to do as we worked on each area. I’m quite sure we spent the better parts of 5 days setting it all up, and we barely made it. By repeating the experience this year, with a few changes, we were able to hand pictures and instructions to our crews and set them loose. By 4:00 we had two stations completely put together, the basic set-up done for all the others. A few pictures….

This is what our auditorium looks like normally… this was our 11:15 service on Sunday. Our building is 20 years old. This room was intended to be only temporary worship space, so it is very much multi-purpose. There is a movable air wall (visible in this picture in it’s storage position: far left side, tall rectangular panel) that can be set in three different positions in the room, separating it front to back. The tracks are visible in this pic as the darker horizontal lines on the ceiling. This picture was taken from our tech booth in the back corner of the room.

This is a view of the same stage later Sunday afternoon. It is being set up for communion in a ‘last supper’ sort of configuration. This will be one of the final stations of the pathway. The purple platforms (with pillows on top) are large, movable pieces that can form a bottom tier of choir risers (the other tiers are built into the platform…can’t really see that in this pic). Here, they function as benches on either side of long tables in the middle. There is also a smaller table on the floor that will provide communion elements for those who can’t climb the steps to the stage.

This is now the view from the stage, looking toward the back of the room. This is the basic set-up for the station that is pictured here (final form in 2005). The air wall has been put in place (the wall behind the cross) so the auditorium has been cut in half. The tech booth is now about 30 feet beyond the air wall. But the main speakers are now in this part of the room. (Makes for interesting sound engineering, should anyone ever want the wall up and full audio support.) That’s only 2 of the 8 stations; there was much progress made on the others, I’m just going to hold off on the pics until it’s all completed. We will spend the next 3 days on things like lighting, audio, signage, and ‘dressing’ each station. I am SO grateful for the incredible volunteers who made this all happen on Sunday. When everyone else had left, we walked through each space to make a our punch list. While sitting in the Judas room (which is filled with photos of things that can distract us from following Jesus), I made this comment out loud with my husband in the room: “the next step for this room, the next time we do this, would be to bombard people with images & video using several flat-panels… sort of a visual noise thing” I don’t know what I was thinking . You don’t mention that kind of idea around my husband and the 2 other hyper-creatives who were there. Ten minutes later, our friends had decided to buy a flat panel TV (they had been thinking about it anyway) to be used in the Judas room, there was an idea afloat about some kind of truss to hold the tv, and my husband had already begun mapping out the video content. Sigh. For one brief afternoon, we were ahead of schedule. :) We’ll see what happens next!

Holy Week Journey, introduction.