Welcome back to the second edition of our series where we take incredible, professional lighting setups and show you how feasible it is for your church to emulate. This time around we are tackling Kari Jobe’s “Your Nature”.
Firstly, I just want to say that this video does a wonderful job of showing how to achieve a dramatic stage presence without maxing out your whole tech budget for the year. In this stage setup we are going to help you breakdown what you are seeing, as well as let you know what you will need to create similar effects.
The process shown above is called “Diffusion” which is the act of creating soft light with neither the intensity nor glare created by direct light. The light is scattered by an object, like a bedsheet or thin paper, and comes from all directions, which gives the appearance of light wrapping around an object or a person. Diffusion helps to “soften” the light and reduces harsh shadows. One of the first things you will notice here is the fabric all around the stage and directly above the subjects. This material can be a number of different things, but as long as the object you are using allows some light through, it can be useful.
Some stages or setups use a type of clouded Plexiglass but that’s quite a bit more expensive. One of the best ways to achieve effective diffusion on a budget is by stretching a large piece of fabric or bedsheet out tightly over whatever lighting elements you are using.
While having this fabric over the stage and with lighting shining through to the stage below, you will need to have white, or light-colored, flooring to help the light reflect back upwards. This will really fill in all angles on your subjects, and give you a more evenly-dispersed lighting effect. The main source of lighting you see here is the LED Wash lights behind the fabric which are similar to this Chauvet DJ SlimBANK T18 RGB Wash Light. These are one of the best lighting fixtures for adding color to backgrounds or to walls.
Also to add a little bit of push to the background subjects you can add some back lighting to angle downward behind the subjects. This will create a silhouette affect for the background so that the lead subjects are the main point of focus, for this you can use a simple LED Par light. For a setup similar to this, it is recommended using a Lighting Console or Controller so that you can easily adjust or change color and brightness.
One of the main features of this setup that is not very noticeable but a very important part to achieve this setup is a Haze Machine. You do not need a large hazer as a little goes a long way but this step is a big key to bring your stage to a more professional level.
Hopefully these tips have helped to shed some light on how you can level up your stage presence! Thanks for reading!
