Hillsong Easter Service

In Easter, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work with Paul Chinnery who is the D3 specialist for Hillsong. Paul invited me to come along and see how a production comes together and offered to run me through the basics of D3. The Hillsong Easter service was the first event where I had been part of a bigger team and it was interesting to see how it all came together.

Although the setup and content creation happened months before the service, I was invited down just as the action started. 3 Days before the actual service, which was on the Easter Sunday, I was invited to join the Hillsong production team in their Bermondsey campus. Their campus doubles up as both a worship area and a production rehearsal space. Since the London Hillsong services are held in the Dominion Theatre the production team was limited by what equipment the current Theatre production used. At the time of the service War Of The Worlds was on and they used a set of different panels that flew in and out by the fly crew. The content was mapped onto the panels by 4 D3 servers and projected by 4 Panasonic projectors, 2 were doubled up to increase the brightness of the long throw projection. The other two had incredible short throw lenses which had a mirror built into the lens, this allowed for an actor to be as close as roughly a meter without any projection illuminating them, even though these projectors were 10 meters up. The surfaces which were being projected on were 3 massive panels, two on either side of the stage and one dead centre which were flown in and out, as well as 8 vertical scrims which lined the back of the stage. There was also a full stage width scrim that came down and allowed projection in front of the actors.

Since War Of The Worlds were using D3 servers in their show, Paul decided to take their show file and change the content so it had the Hillsong content and the stage moves. At the end of day 1 we had made major progress in adjusting the show file for our needs. The next day we loaded up the show file and found that it had been corrupted. At the time of writing this I can’t quite remember the exact reason for it however I think it was along the lines of the D3 show file for War Of The Worlds had been using an old version of the server software and did not update their servers, but still updated their show file. This caused massive corruptions when we went to adjust the show file. D3 was unable to help with the problem because the server software was not up-to-date even though it was recommended. This meant that we had to start a new show file completely from scratch. We were able to use the objects from the old show file, such as the proscenium and screens, as they were only referenced in D3. We recreated the whole stage within a few hours. Paul showed walked me through how to create scenes, how to choose what content is mapped where, how to insert content, how to let timecode trigger the scenes and how to animate in and out the panels so that they were projected onto. After creating a few scenes with the help of Paul, he was happy for me to go through and program most of the show while he sorted out other things such as timecode and how Qlab was going to trigger D3. On day 3 we were just going through the show and correction any mistakes or any slight issues which might have caused a problem when the show file was uploaded onto the servers at War Of The Worlds.

That night as I was going home to get a good sleep so that I could catch the earliest train out of the station to get the Dominion, the Hillsong production teams worked all night to make sure the show fitted perfectly in the venue. The final adjusting of content, editing lighting pallets and warping the output of the projectors were done over the night into the morning. As the world started to wake up on Sunday, the first and only rehearsal started where we could finally see how everything looked in the venue. And boy was I blown away. Coming from only ever doing small events and working on a production this big was an incredible opportunity.

The favourite part of all 5 services which were run was at the very end of the performance, there was an LED wall behind 8 scrims all in a row. When the LED wall blasted its colours through the scrim it looked amazing! For me it was incredible to see how the production came together and what it felt like working in a big team. I am very grateful to Paul for giving me the opportunity to be part of the service. Paul is an amazing D3 and WatchOut technician. You can view his website by going to this link: http://www.paulchinnery.co.uk