Live@Work - 21_CW32 - Youth service in the Protestant church in Mittenwald

Hello! My name is Tom Schwarz and I come from Mittenwald, a small mountain village in the very south of Bavaria in Germany. Our small protestant church has a new, young pastor couple from Brazil. They asked us to put on a light and sound show at the beginning of July as part of a youth service.

About me

Briefly about my background: Already as a teenager I played drums in a rock cover band and took care of the technology, also at our (small) gigs.

During the school vacations I mostly worked in Austria at my uncle's place, who had a wholesale for light and sound equipment. Since then, light and sound are my hobby. After moving and a long break, I ended up in a band again and through many contacts and through eBay classifieds, I have gathered a complete small stage over the last few years, so 12 scissor platforms, trusses, crank stands etc.

The programming of the show

Since the first Corona lockdown, I offered a programming course to young people through Zoom. We first started with HTML and worked our way up. The young people (between 12 and 17 years old) had no previous knowledge. Because of the programming work for the light show, I decided to program the show together with the teenagers.

First, we got the lyrics of the songs and printed them out. For each part (chorus, verse etc.) we then invented light moods together with cues such as rainbow, lighthouse etc. - everything just as it came into our heads. Then we let the songs run and noted the seconds when, for example, the chorus begins.

Song texts with notes about different light cues

Implementation in DMXControl 3

In the next part we continued with DMXControl 3. There we loaded a photo of the church into Stage View and roughly arranged the elements.

Each song is a scene list, triggered by the time code and partly then running automatically (follow steps).

A newly created softdesk then got the Play, Pause and Stop buttons per song.

And in the input assignment we then linked the respective scene with the audio file.

Stage View   Cuelist of one track   Softdesk   Assignment in a connection set

The devices

In use we had:

2 x Clay Paky Golden Scan HPE

2 x Clay Paky MiniScan

8 x PAR56 Spot 300W (via self-made dimmer, see below)

2 x PAR56 LED 24x3W

2 self-made LED matrix columns from old living room lamps, NeoPixel strips and Arduino Micro-DMX (self-made board), see below

8 x PAR64 LED self-developed (each 4W warm white as stage background lighting) via self-built DMX relay board

The room concepts

Because the church room is so beautifully simple and the cross so striking, I decided not to use stands and trusses, but to "hide" the whole lighting system on the floor. The scanners were on their cases and the PARs on fireproof bases on benches.

We filmed the dress rehearsal with our cell phones and got permission from the musicians, the O'Bros (two young rappers from Munich) to share the videos.

The technical details of my self-made boards

LED tower   Assembled board   Empty board After I was able to address the LED PARs and the scanners quite regularly via DDF, Nodle and a DMX cable, my first problem was my old PAR 56 fixtures. I didn't want to and couldn't buy a dimmer pack. So, I built a board which receives the DMX signal with an Arduino Nano and can dim four lamps via four TRIACs. Built the whole thing twice in a case and I had my 8-channel dimmer pack!

The next problem I tackled was my basic lighting. These eight homemade LEDs run off a (non-dimmable) 15V plug-in power supply. Here the easiest thing to do was to switch the 15V with a relay, so you can switch the basic lighting on and off via the softdesk.

Finally came the idea with the light columns. Here I got two living room lights with flexible fabric as a gift. These had blue, fluorescent tubes built into them. I removed them and simply glued a strip of NeoPixels. On the length of a column, I have then 35 RGB-LEDs, which I can control with a Generic DDF individually with RGB. About the matrix function go then also 1-click effects like fire simulation - very cool!

Also here is one of my blue boards installed, an Arduino Nano accepts DMX and forwards it to the NeoPixel strips. It's a cool thing and can be extended as much as you like! I have many more ideas...

I look forward to your feedback!

And many thanks to the DMXControl Projects e.V., without which all this would not have been possible.

Tom