5 Simple Tips To Create Great Lighting Design in Your Church

Churches need proper lighting, especially if it is a larger church to ensure that the entire congregation is able to see the choir, preacher, and anyone else who may be up on the stage. When it comes to improving lighting in a church, you don’t necessarily have to spend a lot of money on expensive gear. Instead, you just need to work with the basics. Here are a few tips that will help you in creating a more effective lighting design in your church.  

Understand the Reasons You Are Using Lights

Essentially, there are four main purposes for creative lighting to be used: standard visibility, selective visibility, modeling, and mood.

Standard visibility is the primary reason for lighting to be used. After all, if the subject is not lit up and visible and instead is in the dark, no one will see it. Selective visibility is in direct relation to regular visibility, as lighting is used to bring attention to a certain part of the stage that the audience needs to be focus while ensuring that the remainder of the stage is not focused on.

Modeling is another reason that lighting can be used. In this instance, the purpose of lighting is to simply help the subject stand out from the background or make the subject more interesting from a visual standpoint. This can be accomplished with color, different angles, intensity variations, or a combination of them all. Lighting is also used for mood. There are many ways in which you can create the mood you want with lighting. You can do it with color, intensity, lighting angles, or a mixture of them all.

Understand Lighting Is Communication

Apart from understanding why you are using the lights, you also need to realize that lighting is a form of communication. This is because lighting can aid in offering visual cues to your audience. Proper use of lighting has the ability to enhance the way you communicate with others.

Let’s say you are using selecting visibility. You are informing the audience where they should and should not look. When the stage lighting or audience is made bright, it lets them know that they should participate. When these areas are darkened and only one section of the stage is illuminated, this lets the audience know to quiet down and pay attention to the lit area of the stage. When the stage is lit with the color blue, this helps to convey a peaceful feeling. However, the color red brings a feeling of tension and evil.

As you can see, lighting can be used in many different ways to help communicate commands, concepts, and feelings to the audience. As previously mentioned, emotion isn’t created by color, lighting angles, and intensity. Instead, the visual cues that are offered by the lighting helps to send the audience into an environment that communicates the subject, especially when those additional emotional content is utilized on the stage as well.

Plan Ahead

It is not uncommon for churches to fail to put much thought into their production lighting. Sometimes, they will begin to plan their production a little to late to put enough thought into the planning. Sometimes, they simply just wing the lighting. In either instance, the lighting is not nearly as effective as it could be had careful, thought-out planning been used.

It is important to realize that lighting designs do not need to be extremely complex and complicated. It all starts with a simple list. Make a list of the colors that you would like to use for the production and/or the stage areas that you would like to have lot for certain scenes of the production/worship. As soon as you have finished with the plan on a piece of paper, you can begin to put it all into action.

This plan will assist you in determining the amount of time you’ll need to hang, focus, and program the overall lighting design. If you will be increasing the number of fixtures in the space, then it will take more time and require more manpower than if more fixtures weren’t being added. In addition, a simple, shorter programming will take less time to program than a longer program with more complex scenes.

Understand the Capabilities of Your Existing Equipment

Some churches will reach out for help in designing a lighting concept when their existing one is just fine. The problem? They aren’t sure how to use it properly. In order to find success with lighting, you must understand how to use the equipment.

The three main types of fixtures in church lighting are ellipsoidals, Fresnels, and PARs. They are all different in their own way and have different capabilities that make them better for different things. For instance, ellipsoidals are great for precision lighting, whereas Fresnels and PARs are ideal for lighting bigger areas.

In addition, you could have LED fixtures, moving lights, color changers, etc. that could increase the capability of your lighting design. It is important to take the time to learn the functions of your fixtures and how to use them. And don’t forget about the console. Although the console is not an actual light, it is the motherboard or brains of it all. The better you are able to understand how this part of the equipment works, the more complex lighting designs you can create.

All in all, the more you can learn your fixtures, the better prepared you will be to take advantage of this equipment.

Take the Time to Experiment

Lighting is one of those skills that you will understand better the more that you do it. At the same time, lighting is an art. Although the technical parts of lighting design cannot be quantified on paper, the artistic aspect of lighting can be seen once it is all in place. Due to this, you will want to take the time to experiment and attempt brand-new things, allowing you to further your skills.

• Attempt different features of the lights, which will allow you to see how they impact the beam and quality of light.
• Attempt different hanging positions and angles, which will allow you to see how it looks and what type of shadows are cast.
• Attempt different materials, such as wood, plastic, and cloth, which allow you to see the interesting concepts that can be created.
• Attempt different color combinations, which will allow you to see how color can impact the mood and presentation.

Although many design concepts can be created on paper, you won’t be able to tell what truly looks great until you hang it and light it up!

Learn from Your Previous Mistakes

As soon as you have your lighting design hung up, light your stage up and look for any areas that seem to be troubling. Once they are located, determine what is needed to remedy the situation. This will help you in two different ways: 1) you will eliminate the present problem, and 2) you will determine what happened to keep it from occurring again (which saves time!).

It is not at all uncommon for people to have issues and fail to fix them either because they don’t want to determine what the problem is or aren’t sure how to repair it.

In addition, as you take part in different productions, there will be scenes that don’t go as planned. Make sure to change what you can to fix the lighting and make the most out of your production.

In conclusion, the aforementioned tips are simple, but overall, using these tips will take some effort and dedication on your part. In the end, the payoff will be worth it. If you need help with your lighting design, reach out to us at Stargate Lighting.