Artiste DaVinci from Elation Professional

By: Jake Brantley

For many youth in America, summer is synonymous with summer camp and for thousands of Christian youth that means a stay at a Student Life Camp. Student Life exists to serve the church in her mission of making disciples. We invite church leadership to be involved in Bible Study and all other aspects of camp with their students, so that when Student Life is over, church leadership has common ground in shared experiences to better guide camp attendees in what they’ve learned. Life has operated a variety of week long interdenominational summer camps across the U.S. since 1993 and this past summer saw 35,000 students participate. Elite Multimedia Productions of Nashville served as lighting, video and audio vendor for this year’s Student Life Camp, providing an Elation Professional touring lighting rig that included Artiste DaVinci™ LED moving head luminaires.

Student Life camps start in late May and run through early August with five traveling teams working hard to put on each camp. We take care of all of the details at camp, i.e. housing, meals, programming, worship, etc, so that the Student Pastor can focus on ministry. Also available for each camp is a dynamic lighting set up used to enhance the worship environment. In the production world, Student Life is a teaching school. Our technicians are generally 20-22 years old and still in school. We take young guys and girls with little experience and hand them a full-size rig to tour around the country with. Each LD is responsible for load in/out, running lights during the show, and maintaining their gear. Our lighting designs are simple enough for a beginner to walk in and successfully run a service but complete enough to keep the more experienced entertained. We use technology to create a space for our staff to learn how to create a worship atmosphere; we help our student techs learn to create moments that augment the Word at a professional level.

Elation’s full-featured Artiste DaVinci LED mover was an integral part of this year’s rig, offering a smaller, lightweight fixture that has great output (13,000 lumens) with a low power draw to help reduce power needs (300W LED engine). It functioned as an LED replacement for 700W fixtures, which typically don’t require a lot of power, but still need that dynamic range of color and movement. On top of that, it provided great optics and smooth color mixing.

The Artiste DaVinci was used as the main profile fixture in the lighting design for the Student Life Camp worship environment. We have five ministry teams on the road over the course of the summer, and each team works from the exact same lighting set-up, which included four Artiste DaVinci’s working from an overhead truss, and four ground positioned. Also in each rig were Elation Platinum Seven™ LED moving heads used for front wash and Elation Rayzor 360Z™ beam/wash LED moving heads used as effect lighting. The lighting rigs are key in generating an upbeat atmosphere, such as during an opening piece moment with video and projector-mapped content where the lighting was used to accent the piece and provide punch to raise the overall energy level.

The Artiste DaVinci’s were reliable – we didn’t have one issue with any of the fixtures over the course of the summer – and their workset is surprisingly deep. That reliability, in conjunction with the colours, movement, and lighting profile allowed our youth LD’s to experiment with a variety of options and create different effects that really showcased their creativity.

The colors themselves are very crisp and bright; and the LED engine of the Artist DaVinci’s keeps the power draw very low. Our entire rig lived on 100 amps (3-phase), which made it very costeffective to run. As well, because they are LED, we didn’t have to worry about lamp replacement. We are already planning next year’s Student Life Camps, and we will definitely be using the same fixtures.

JAKE BRANTLEY IS THE DIRECTOR OF PRODUCTION FOR STUDENT LIFE CAMP – STUDENT LIFE ON INSTAGRA AND TWITTER.