Project Details: Abundant Life Community Church
Blaine, MN
October 2006
Introduction
When AVE first met Senior Pastor Steve Finton, and Associate Pastor of New Connections Rick Santiago, AVE was impressed with ALCC’s vision for their new building expansion. They understood the community they lived in, being full of young families, would expect modern audio, video and lighting technology. However, since ALCC had a limited building budget, they decided to put a large portion of their budget into the total worship experience, instead of raw square footage.
Acoustics
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AVE began by working with ALCC’s architect Scott Crosby on developing a space that would work well within their budget and still provide a modern “theater style” experience. The acoustics of the room would need to be more like a movie theater – absorptive, and not live.
As the acoustical modeling began, concerns arose about the split-face blocks that would be used for the walls. Although the slight variations in the walls were good for mid and high bands, low frequency reverberation was a real problem.
Ave recommended a flown ceiling tile cloud system with batte insulation on top, to act as a natural bass trap, as well as other wall diffusion and absorption.
Audio
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Once the acoustics were completed, the innovative sound system was designed accommodate the room as a theater. A 5.1 surround sound design was employed. The addition of surround sound also made a large impact for DVD playback of sermon examples, youth services and movie nights. When the worship band plays, the system runs in mono mode.
Special attention to detail was given to the speakers, as they were flow horizontally, instead of hanging low. Subwoofers were also built into the concrete stage.
Video
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With a theater style room and the center-set used as the focal point, AVE suggested the church use the entire 24-foot wide, flat wall surface above the stage.
As a “matte”, the space incorporated new technology called “edge-blending”, which incorporated two projectors that converged, creating an overlap region. Then, through high resolution image processing, that region was “blended”, and a matte background of a solid color, graphics or expanded video was created as a background. PIP’s (picture-in-picture) were created to overlay images on top of this background.
Multiple PIP’s were able run at one time including graphics, live camera video, DVD playback and keying of text. The net result was a highly configurable visual set that captured the attention of the viewer.
The edge blend method also added aspect ratio flexibility so allowed any content 4:3 or 16:9 to be used with a black background, in whatever size or location works best. The system accepted up to 12 inputs of any video source at any resolution, including HD video.
Lighting
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The worship center lighting is run from one centralized dimmer in the back equipment room, and house “can” lights and theater style fixtures are able to change scenes simultaneously. Creative lighting allowed the church to set up scenes for events and save them as presets. As the worship service moved between various points, ALCC was able to control the mood and feel of the space using only lighting. The lighting system was also designed with the ability to expand in the future.
Additional Information
As of October 2006, this was the first installed edge-blend projection system in a church in the state of Minnesota.
lifechurchblaine.com/visualtour
Additional Images
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