Life Church is a multicultural church. The community enjoys vibrant services with passionate worship, life relevant preaching & dynamic children’s and youth programs.
Along with their regular Sunday and mid-week services, the church hosts two large school programs during the week with lots of art projects. The church also runs some small groups on weekdays. Lighting had to cater to all these scenarios. As a result, Life Church decided to take advantage of the recent lockdowns to do some upgrades around the venue.
Andrew Gardner is the lead AV technician at Townsville’s Life Church and IT Manager for Townsville Christian College. He worked in the professional AV industry for a number of years and is always determined to do things the “right” way, after having the privilege to work with and learn from leading professionals. After doing scouting the market for some LED fixtures and in particular house lighting, The Ovation series from CHAUVET Professional was suggested by Showtools International. After receiving a demo of some of the Ovation range, Andrew couldn’t have been happier with the products and decided to upgrade with a variety of CHAUVET Professional fixtures.
“One aspect that we’d been putting off for a long time was house lighting. The original fluoros lit the space well enough but they lacked any sort of control or dimming, and the light quality was pretty average. This is where the new Ovation H-55WW house lights come in and we decided to acquire 27 of them,” stated Andrew.
The Ovation H-55WW is a small and silent, convection cooled LED house light with a punchy warm white output and a high CRI, ideal for theatres, worship venues and recital halls or any other application with a smaller trim height.
“Our main room is about 20 by 25 metres. We’ve installed 27 Ovation units and find them super bright but also natural and warm. We will soon be adding another five to cover some tricky areas. We originally intended to keep our fluoros side-by-side with the Ovations, never expecting to use them as our daily house light driver. We were so happy with the results, we decided to rip out all the fluoros and replace with new ceiling tiles, which makes everything look so much cleaner – I was actually really surprised,” explained Andrew.
Andrew continued, “Making it all easy to use was a key thing for us. We installed a relay-based control panel on the wall for simple on/off but also have full control of each fixture through the NX Wing at front of house. Before we installed, I hooked each light to the console direct via DMX to address each one in the structure that I had planned. After syncing to the wireless point, they were ready to put in place. One of the best things about these lights is how little power they draw. At this point, we have all 27 running off one 10A circuit without any problems! We haven’t been running them long enough to see any changes in power bills but expect to do so, particularly in the heat of summer. Everyone in our flock loves the quality of light from these fixtures. Their dimming curve is spectacularly smooth. I love it punchy & bright and they can sure do that. We just ran our first full service and had them at 45% for the whole function and everyone thought they were fantastic.”
As part of the upgrade, Andrew also acquired Ovation F-265WWs fresnels. “The Ovation F-265WW is a high-power Fresnel-style fixture utilizing our efficient warm white LED system to project a bright, beautifully soft, high CRI (95+) field of light ideal for our church,” stated Andrew. “It also comes with a motorized zoom with a 27°- 68° field angle and the light output can be controlled via DMX, onboard dials, RDM, adjustable PWM and an easy to navigate OLED full-text display. The Ovation range from CHAUVET Professional has been flawless, as they are punchy, bright and their dimming curves are spectacularly smooth.”
In addition, Maverick and Rogue fixtures were purchased to complement the Ovation range. Andrew explained, “We acquired 2x Maverick MK2 Profiles, these fixtures deliver ultimate precision via its advanced 4-blade dual-position rotating framing system, a stunningly bright 440 W LED engine, two 6-position rotating slot and lock gobo wheels, CMY + CTO colour mixing, variable frost, 3-facet prism, and a 13° to 37° zoom range. The profiles give us full coverage with their impressive output and throw distance.”
“The Rogue R3 Spots deliver intense output, crisp optics, and sharp focus with its bright 300W LED light engine that produces an even field of light for some stunning looks,” said Andrew. “A quick-moving zoom range of 15 – 39° adds to its flexibility of use which gives us the ability to cover large areas. The combination of the Rogue and Maverick fixtures allow a greater sense of depth, drawing on their intensity and gobo capabilities.”
Andrew concluded, “We couldn’t be happier with the CHAUVET Professional products and the support is excellent from Showtools. They even pre-fitted 240V plugs so we could just hang and plugin. They go out of their way to do the little touches like this to keep us happy as a customer. It’s not the first time either.”
