Sing Gospel 2016

Sing Gospel is an event held in association with Twyford CofE High School. The evening showcased the Sing Gospel choir and the Manchester Inspirational Voices choir singing some of their favourite gospel songs. This year the event was held in the Performance Centre at Twyford HighSchool instead of St Mary’s Church. I thought the change in venue might change the atmosphere that I am use to at Sing Gospel events however the atmosphere was still as powerful, probably even more powerful than in the church.

The lighting rig for Sing Gospel was the same as what was used at the PMC however the sunstrips had been moved around to allow for extra staging and room for the band. If you want to see the design process for the lighting rig then take a look at my PMC 2016 portfolio page. Although I stand by what I wrote in the PMC page, that having a rig of beam lights does not work, I personally believe that the lighting for Sing Gospel came out better than the PMC. I ended up creating a set list on the AVO where every page was a different song. These pages contained by looks such as stage wash and some effects. Although I had programmed some songs on faders, for most of the show I ended up busking it with the different colour, effects and position palettes I had created. Although I find busking more stressful, I believe that most of the time – when time is limited – it wields better results than programming cues and looks.

I had brought my desktop, which I nicknamed ‘The Beast’ for a reason, to cope with projection mapping with Resolume for the PMC. The Sing Gospel event didn’t request any projection so the events manager at Twyford thought it would be best to remove them however this didn’t stop my computer being used. Josh Cadman, who runs Sing Gospel, requested a live stream to facebook of the event. Since the request was very last minute, it meant we had to use the equipment that we had in-house. Richard Bland, the events manager, owned a pair of Sony Z1s which we used for the live stream. Since these were running over composite the quality wasn’t great however it was good enough for something that was asked for the day before. My PC had a Blackmagic Decklink recorder card in, which was used to get the output from ProPresenter which was running on another computer beside mine. We used ProPresenter for the lower thirds and displaying the names of the songs. I also used a thunderbolt PCIE card which allowed me to use Twyford’s BlackMagic Ultra Studio Express which was used to take the input from the vision mixer, which controlled the camera shots. My PC also ran OBS, Open Broadcaster Software, which was linked to the Sing Gospel Facebook page for streaming.

Although I personally didn’t know about the live stream request until the day I still wanted to make it as good as possible. This year my motto was, if we’re gonna do it then we’re gonna do it properly, and I stick to this. I love creating custom content for video displays and in this case I made some custom content for the live stream. I created a 2 different holding screens, a ‘Sing Gospel is about to go live’ and a ‘We’ll be back soon’ for the interval. I also created a 10 minute countdown, a holder showing just the logo holder for the end of the live stream and a lower third section for ProPresenter. I created all of this customer content on Adobe AfterEffects. Below you can see the custom content that I made for the live stream.