the concept

Director Kasey Cox’s idea was simple and brilliant: Jack Kelly is an artist — so let his drawings be the scenery. Illustrator Emily Rice drew the world of the show by hand. Animator Chris Schloemp animated the drawings in and out of one another. And the drawings lived on an LED wall rented and rigged from Wolfe Productions in St. Louis.

My charge, in one sentence: the lighting needed to feel like an extension of the art on the wall. Colors had to match. It had to feel like one cohesive space — not a rig pointed at a video screen.

light where the ink stops

Emily’s drawings had a hand-inked, newsprint feel. That became the engine of the design. From my production emails, mid-process:

When the wall went sepia, the rig carried the color story. The lighting supplied the palette the ink left out — Santa Fe’s warmth, the strike’s reds, the Refuge’s cold — so the drawings and the stage always read as one world, never as scenery plus lighting.

the art itself — “watch what happens”

Frames from Emily’s sequence for the song, drawn at 2048×566 — the wall’s own shape. In the illustrated script, a bolded line cues each drawing onto the wall and an underline fades it out — the art was performed, not displayed:

liberty, with a paintbrush for a torch

david and goliath

the world on fire

the face of the strike

the gates, pitchforks up

artwork: emily rice · used with permission

check out more of emily’s work →

an illustrated script

The art was cued like dialogue. The team built an illustrated script where a bolded line meant “this is the cue line for the image below,” and an underline meant the drawing fades out. Video and lighting were talking through the same document from the first production meeting — which is also where the zoom calls about “what the projections do versus what light does in each moment” got settled long before load-in.

from the concept call

My raw notes from the first call with Kasey — verbatim, because these became the cue list:

the rig — and the why on every fixture

127 fixtures across six DMX universes, run on ETC Eos:

Moving lights for this show were a must. The color mixing from the Chauvets supplemented the house rig, and the movers let me isolate sections of the stage — and put texture over the whole room when the show called for it.

The rented gear came from 4Wall. I went with them because of their work on other large lighting shows — I knew I could get Broadway care on an education budget.

The whole show was designed fully virtually — plot and paperwork in Vectorworks, previs renders, magic sheets, and patch built before load-in, so tech time went to art, not addressing.

When I was boots on the ground, the work was immediate: fix moving-head positions, update palettes for the real-world positions — and get to cueing.

paperwork & previs

key plot

previs render

eos magic sheet

the result

photos: nick cook · david ayres

directed by Kasey Cox · artwork by Emily Rice · animation by Chris Schloemp · LED wall: Wolfe Productions, St. Louis

the catalyst

The catalyst here was foresight. The Chapel’s aging projector was due to be replaced with an LED wall — and an LED wall is brighter than a ten-year-old rig can answer. Rather than install the wall and watch the lighting lose to it, faces going dark against a wall of pixels, the lights and the wall were changed together: one project, one plan, one cohesive room.

the room before

The old rig was a hodgepodge: Amazon-special fixtures and used gen-1 gear from smaller brands, all roughly a decade old — even the “new” pieces arrived secondhand. And this room works hard. It hosts weddings and funerals, Sunday morning church, academy chapels, student ministry, and theatre — and it was doing all of them poorly.

the brief

Simple: the old lights weren’t getting the job done. Make the most flexible room possible, for as little money as possible. $12k is real money for a lot of organizations — but for a lighting redesign of this scale, it sits at the low end. That constraint shaped every decision that follows.

five rooms in one

Each event style asks for something the others don’t:

the package

Delivered all-in for under $12k:

• 10× Chauvet DJ Shocker Panel FX — bright LED wash
• 8× Eliminator Stealth ZW — moving-head LED wash
• 4× Chauvet Intimidator 375ZX — LED spot
• Chauvet Hurricane Haze 4D — haze
• custom LED pixel strips — built in-house

Just as important is what didn’t make the list. The dying Orion moving heads — bad motor stepping, unreliable — came down rather than eating budget on repairs. The old pars went straight in the garbage. But nothing useful was wasted: the square fixtures and R2 spots were redeployed as a ground package, getting a second life instead of a line item.

the rig — where everything lives

Two electrics hang over the stage — upstage and mid-stage — and each carries an interleaved line of wash, key, and spot, mirrored between rows so that coverage comes from everywhere:

The six shockers over the stage carry the broad wash; the four Intimidators split upstage/mid-stage as the spot layer. The four Stealth ZWs are the key light position — two upstage, two mid-stage — and because they move, they can key or spot anywhere in the room or on the stage. The four rear-of-room shockers are what light up for student ministry: the whole room becomes part of the rig. Down on the deck, the old square fixtures got a second life as a ground package washing up the LED wall, and the R2 spots work from the sides — three a side, which is what makes real theatre sidelight possible in a chapel. The green lines in the renders are custom LED pixel strips, built in-house.

Every flown fixture has a low profile, so the rig disappears into the ceiling. And critically: nothing moves between event types. The changeover from a funeral to a student ministry night to a theatre run happens at the console, not on a ladder.

previs & paperwork

The room was designed fully virtually before a single fixture was hung — and the previs shows the wall and the rig working as one system. For the traditional look, the LED wall itself becomes the stained glass.

previs render — stained glass on the led wall, movers in blue

plan view previs — key truss, wall & rear washes

vectorworks plot — plan view

one button

The room runs on a grandMA3 compact, and the programming philosophy is simple: five base macros — one per event type — plus intensity faders for each group of lights. A volunteer can walk in, press one button, and have a complete base look for their event. For anyone who wants to go further, training is offered — and the desk is set up for busking, with guardrails and failsafes underneath so nobody can get the room into trouble.

the wall that started it

The install test for the LED wall that kicked this whole project off:

led wall install test

the five looks

takeaways

A word of honesty before you take this number and run: $12k didn’t solve everything — it solved this room. This project worked because the infrastructure was already in place to build on. If your space needs power, rigging, or data before it needs fixtures, that’s where the money goes first.

The real lesson isn’t the gear list. It’s finding the correct tools to achieve your end result. Every room is different — not every space needs washes, not every space needs spots. Start from what the room has to do, and let that decide what hangs.

the problem

The Chapel went from a 1920×1080 projector to a nontraditional LED wall — 1792×768, in a space that hosts everything from services to school assemblies to funerals. But the video chain didn’t change with it: the DeckLink Duo 2 only outputs 1920×1080, so the wall lives as an island centered inside a raster it doesn’t fill. ProPresenter pushes the content, and ProPresenter is locked to the card’s aspect — not the wall’s.

Every photo and video that hits the wall has to land on that island precisely. Content made at the wrong size scales wrong, crops wrong, or sits wrong in the frame.

who makes the content

And here’s the thing: the people making the content are academy teachers building event graphics, and families handing over funeral slideshows with a hundred to two hundred photos. They can’t always make the right size graphics — and they shouldn’t have to. Nobody bringing photos of their mother to a funeral should need to know what a raster is.

before

The fix was rescaling everything by hand inside ProPresenter — per photo, per event. It worked, but it was unsustainable because of how long it took. The wall didn’t have a content problem; it had a time problem.

the tool

ScreenPrep takes a folder — or one file — and batch-processes everything to land correctly on the wall inside the raster, then hands back a zip. The fit modes are the design language:

It handles video too, and everything runs in the browser — nothing is uploaded anywhere. A funeral slideshow never leaves the machine it’s on.

the outcome

ScreenPrep is so simple that anyone on the team who touches ProPresenter can run it — teachers, techs, and volunteers all prep their own content now. Wrong-sized graphics stopped crossing the Production Director’s desk entirely.

takeaways

try screenprep →

the problem

We run a lot of songs on timecode. The generating part was never hard — the tracking part was. There was no good way to keep track of which code belonged to which song, and people would generate the wrong timecode: wrong start address, wrong rate, wrong file entirely. When the desk locks to the wrong hour, your cues fire against nothing — and you find out with the band on stage.

the fix — a library, not a generator

The tool’s real product isn’t the WAV — it’s the library. Every song gets an entry, every entry gets a pinned start address, and the generator produces one correctly named file per song. The naming is enforced by the tool, not by whoever happened to export last. Add a new song and it joins the library; ask for the file again and you get the same answer every time.

a csv in dropbox is the database

The library lives as a CSV next to the audio files in a Dropbox folder — which effectively makes it a network timecode database with no server, no login, and nothing to maintain. It’s human-readable at 9am with the band waiting, and every machine that opens the tool sees the same library.

That’s the multiplier: now all campuses use the same timecode. A song’s address is the same address everywhere, so cues and files port between rooms without translation.

how it flows

Playback runs the named WAV out of the rig; the desk and ProPresenter chase it. Nobody regenerates anything on show day — the file that exists is the file that’s right.

the outcome

Wrong timecode is effectively eliminated. The failure mode didn’t get rarer — it got removed: you can’t grab the wrong file when there’s exactly one file, correctly named, pinned to the song.

takeaways

try the ltc generator →