Recent Work: The Salvation Army – Sydney Youth Councils 2015

I recently had the privilege of being the Technical Coordinator for The Salvation Army’s Sydney Youth Councils 2015. I have worked on this event before, and it’s an amazing team to be a part of. This is an annual event, bringing Youth and Young Adults from across Sydney together for the weekend.

This year, we held the Sunday event in Horrocks Hall at The Kings School, North Parramatta. This is a beautiful venue, providing a great setting for our event. We brought in audio, lighting and video and additional staging as well as a whole team to set it up and run it.

Audio

Audio was mixed on a Behringer X32, with Mackie HD’s a Meyer subs for FoH. We had 8 channels of Shure ULX-D wireless, QSC K-series foldbacks, and a couple of Sennheiser in-ear monitors. James Cox did an amazing job of managing FOH, foldback and in-ear mixes.

Lighting

We upped the ante on lighting this year. The rig consisted mostly of Martin MAC Auras and Quantum Profiles, with some conventional fixtures for front lighting and LED panels at the back for audience lighting. Control was via a GrandMA2. Most of the rig was flown from truss at the back of stage, with two smaller pieces dropped off the main truss either side of the screen.

Jarrad Donovan was our lighting designer, and he really took it to a whole other level (which I suppose you’d expect, given he tours the world as a lighting designer). The rig and design really worked well with the music and video to create an atmosphere of worship.

Video

We used a Barco W8 projector at the centre of our rig for the main projector screen. We drove lyrics via ProPresenter 5, and background content via Resolume Arena. Although ProPresenter does background video, we split it up like this so we could have a dedicated background operator. James Eden created many amazing looks on the fly using a combination of pre-produced footage and the built-in effects. It complimented the lighting beautifully, and of-course the lyrics were still highly visible and readable.

The two sources were keyed together with a Blackmagic Design ATEM. Resolume Arena was controlled via a Behringer BCF2000 MIDI controller.

We also produced a huge amount of video content for the event, such as video testimonies, ads for other events, countdowns, an opener (to compliment a live drama) and holding slides. While I don’t have rights to upload all of this to YouTube, I’ve created a quick compilation: