By Zachary McCrorey
Founded in 2010 and led by Pastor Derwin Gray, Transformation Church began with a group of about 200 individuals who believed in God’s vision to be a multiethnic, multigenerational, mission-shaped community. Located in Indian Land, South Carolina, Transformation Church has been recognized as one of the fastest growing churches by Outreach Magazine across multiple years since its conception. We are incredibly thankful that weekly thousands of people attend locally and that we have the resources to broadcast worldwide.
Designing the Stage
All our stage designs are born out of our sermon series development meetings. The sermon series aesthetic is always rooted in the sermon direction and its messages produced by our Lead Pastor. With Pastor Derwin being prepared a full year out in his sermon prep, he has gifted our Weekend Services and Communication teams with an incredibly long runway to peacefully dream and develop unique visuals and stage designs to support each series. As it is our organization’s heart to value generosity and resources, I decided that this year I would do my very best to plan even further ahead and design the future stages in a way where one design could support multiple sermon series with light refreshes to keep it relevant with whatever that series aesthetic package would be.
My Name Is…
Our Christmas 2023 stage design package featured many fun elements: an upstage LED wall, a ribbon led wall rental package, band risers, a star curtain, 12’ Christmas trees, and a heavy lighting package…it was Christmas – I’m sure you understand where I’m going. To kick off the new year, our January sermon series called “My Name Is,” curated in-house by our Creative Lead Alex Acevedo, pointed towards a more minimalistic look that highlighted gray and rust textures, a graffiti on cement for an industrial look, and clouds. Of course, pushing through a busy Christmas season, our Production team was excited that this could be a lighter tech installation. After a few drafts and conversations with Alex, we decided that it would be a cool and different vibe for us to install faux-cement wall facades that could be painted in color with our existing lighting infrastructure.
Our team constructed 26 4’ x 8’ frames out of 1”x 2” strip boards which were then wrapped in texturized cement-faux fabric. Once all the frames were built, we double-stacked them to create 13 16’ x 8’ columns and rigged them to our electrics line sets. Double-stacking them added so much height to the feel of our stage which was a nice surprise!
We also refreshed our lighting plot by placing most of our moving lights in the air so that we could easily light the wall facades as needed. The cool thing about the wall was that it essentially disappeared when all the ambient lighting was removed, allowing cool visual changes.
We sourced various gobos from Rosco to support the series direction: a couple of graffiti gobos for some onstage fun plus cloud gobos that were inserted into our environmental lighting fixtures to bring the series vibes out into the house. With a mix of volunteers and production staff, the entire build and installation took approximately 3 days. The design was such a hit, that we decided to keep it through the following series for a total of 13 weeks.
Grow By
In April, a new series called “Grow By” was slated to launch, hence time for a stage design refresh. The series visual narrative drew inspiration from the symbolism of fruit which featured vibrant floral colors and branches. Over a couple of weeks, I played around with the CAD drawing to see how we could shake up the feel of the stage having maximum impact with minimal investment of our staff’s time.
We accomplished this by removing 6 of the double- stacked columns, which created openings for us to install pipes suspended 8’ down which enabled us to hang a moving wash and profile at different heights. We flipped the center LED Wall to a vertical resolution which was the biggest bang for a few bucks.
Finally, we replaced the existing onstage gobos and framed them onto each of the six columns creating “portraits” of trees growing toward upstage center. The environmental gobos were also replaced with floral-style gobos that tied it everything all together.
We were really stoked to have only invested $3,000 for all components to build out this design that will cover 26 weeks until the end of its run. This stage design represents many TC values and plumb lines: “People over Production,” “Flexibility within the framework,” “Teamwork makes the dreamwork,” and “Less is more.”
Because of minimalistic scenic design, intentional lighting programming, heavy collaboration, and catalytic planning rooted in one of TC’s values that I love to my core, “People over Production,” we accomplished our goal in producing an environment that was welcoming, one that supported and enhanced all of the sermon series for the first half of the year and had a high return of investment.
Zachary McCrorey, born and raised in the Carolinas, has had a life-long passion for Live Events and Technical Production. After obtaining his Bachelor of Arts degree in Theater-Technical and Design, he’s been blessed to have had incredible experiences within the Arts industry such as touring the world as a Production Stage Manager for Pilobolus, managing the Entertainment technical operations at Carowinds Amusement Park, and freelancing as an LD and Event Manager in the Charlotte metro area. His time at TC has been life-changing and he is incredibly grateful for the love, trust, and support he’s received from the leadership and staff at Transformation Church.
@zach.isaiah // @transformationchurch
