Sermons from the senior pastor are fed from the Southlake campus to the two other church locations. But each of those campuses also use grandMA gear. The location in North Richland Hills (NRH), TX has a grandMA2 lite, and the extension campus in Frisco, TX, which opened last July, also will be receiving a grandMA lite from lighting supplier Barbizon Lighting.
“I used to be a touring guy whose console of choice was the original grandMA,” said director of lighting/stage design Kyle Russelburg. “When I joined the church in 2008, part of overhauling the current lighting system was upgrading their current lighting console to the grandMA.
“The staff fell in love with them right away,” Russelburg added. “They were easy to train on and fast to program. They just worked great. The transition from the grandMA to the grandMA2 was simple, too: The syntax really remained close to the grandma series 1. This really made it easier to go ahead an upgrade to the series 2 console.”
For Southlake’s 4,000-seat auditorium, the grandMA gear runs 48 moving lights, 92 LED fixtures, 389 dimmers, 18 LED video panels and two media servers. The other two campuses feature 12 moving lights and 50 LED PARs and will be installing a media server as well.
“The grandMAs are rock solid,” Russelburg said. “We run them over Art-Net and streaming ACN and have never had a problem. We have a lot of volunteers, and they have been able to run cues and program stuff in a very short amount of time.”
Gateway Church annually hosts a conference that brings churches from around the world to the campuses to examine their media installations. “A lot of churches always tell me they could never afford a grandMA, but after a few minutes of explaining the different products and console sizes and what it does for us, they revise their thinking,” said Russelburg. “It’s really an easy sale once you dive into the console and show all it can do.”
For more information, please visit www.actlighting.com.
