DiTech AV sets the Impact Youth Camp Stage with PR Lighting and Mega Systems

Impact Youth Camp (IYC) is a two-week long church retreat that attracts high school and middle school students from churches from all over Texas to San Antonio. Over 1200 students attend, participating in group seminars, praise and worship. The organisers of the event turned to DiTech AV of El Campo, TX to handle the lighting, audio and video design and production, including fixtures from PR Lighting as a major part of the lighting inventory.

The production has grown substantially since Paul Guthrie, owner of DiTech AV became involved with the event 10 years ago. This year DiTech AV challenged itself with a design that departed from anything it had done in the past, Mr Guthrie working with his LD Dan Brunson to conceive a unique design. With the stage being large, the biggest challenge was creating an intimate feel to the space, without losing its grandeur. Guthrie and Brunson decided to frame the stage with Dicolor LED video panels and to fill in the spaces with six pieces of stick truss. ‘The clarity was amazing,’ says Mr Guthrie, ‘It looked so much better than any projection we have used in the past.’

Lighting played an equally important role in the stage design. Guthrie used a total of 32 fixtures from PR Lighting and Mega-Lite combined – led by eight PR Lighting XR 300 Beam moving head lights, with super concentrated parallel beams, which Mr Guthrie says provided high output and variable gobo effects. ‘They looked incredible and allowed us to use them in several different ways.’

In addition, 12 tiny PR Lighting XLED 3007 fixtures (housing seven 20W 4-in-1 RGBW LEDs) and six Mega-Lite Axis QD7 fixtures provided colour washing and eye candy effects with their pixel control capabilities. ‘They are so fast and super versatile’ says Mr Guthrie, commenting that he made use of the XLED 3007 ‘infinite’ pan and tilt, and built-in W-DMX. ‘They’re a great addition to our toolkit.’ Mega Systems’ Enlighten ONE Console with four universes provided the lighting control. Two RGBlink VSP198S switcher/scalers and one RGBlink Driver were used to programme the walls. These products, along with support from Mega Systems, per Mr Guthrie, made the set-up easy to configure.

Throughout the two weeks of the camp, Mr Guthrie recalls numerous compliments from the youth pastors and students, including some saying that the lighting and video painting the picture of the gospel had helped them to focus more on worship. DiTech AV reports that several of the youth pastors in attendance at IYC booked them for upcoming events at their own churches throughout Texas.