Europe’s Largest All-Night Worship Event

Jands Vista T2 consoles helped worshippers celebrate Easter at Europe’s largest all-night worship event, attended by 30,000 people at London’s ExCel, and a separate event at Wembley Arena.

Worshippers packed out ExCel’s main hall for ‘Festival of Life’, a unique event supported by over 150 churches in the UK which has become the largest all night non-denominational gathering of people in Europe coming together to celebrate God.

Reading-based production company SFL Group provided the complete technical solution and production management for both events. This included over 120 speakers of d&b audiotechnic with Yamaha digital control surfaces, Barco projection and control systems, acoustic draping and stage lighting.

Brighton-based Tamplins Stage Lighting, which has a reputation in the industry for providing lighting production services to conferences, rock concerts and one-off programmes in the Worship market, was engaged by SFL to provide the stage lighting element.

Show lighting designer Sam Tamplin knew there was only one console he’d want to use for the job of providing the lighting control on the massive ExCel event, and knew his choice would also have the full backing of his client.

He commented: “Last year I was looking for a more powerful desk to handle our growing show control needs and entered a competition to win a day’s free Vista training. I had to build a basic show using the Vista demo software, which left me very impressed by how user-friendly and intuitive it was. After then spending a whole day training on the console, I was absolutely convinced it was the only way to go, so I had to invest in one!”

Sam’s lighting brief was to aid the worship experience over the 10-hour event using lots of movement and colour changes. The show ran from 7pm until 5am and featured a prayer service with various guest speakers, a live band and gospel choir, so Sam needed to create an uplifting conference set which had the ability to morph into a more energetic concert feel.

‘Festival of Life’ featured a rig of Mac 2000s, Mac 700s, Mac 600s, Mac 250 Entours, City Colours, Studio Due CS4s and generics, with custom gobos projected onto a large white backdrop to provide branding.

In addition, Tamplins Stage Lighting provided SFL Group with a second Vista T2 console for ‘Times of Refreshing’, a morning worship service held at Wembley Arena featuring prayer, worship and healing led by worldwide Evangelist Reinhard Bonnke.

Summarising his experience using the Vista for the ‘Festival of Life’ all night event, Sam commented: “The nature of worship events is that you have to have a lot of live control over the rig, so you are able to react in an instant to what’s going on. This means you can only pre-program certain things, and the rest is just busking. The Vista is ideal for running shows on the fly as you’ve got everything clearly laid out in front of you and can change things fast. The brief for this job was lots of colour changing, and the Vista’s colour picker seriously helped with the live busking of this! The user interface and speed of programming also makes it ideal for an event such as this, where we had to use the same rig for both the conference and concert. Whether I’ve been using it on a show for 400 people or 30,000 people, the Vista’s layout just makes it so easy to use.”

Tamplins Stage Lighting: www.stagelightinghire.com
SFL Group: www.SFLgroup.co.uk