March 14, 2007

Today is the first set-up day for our big four day event that starts Thursday at 7 p.m. We are running sound and lights for a church for their anniversary celebration. There will be guest speakers and some very talented musicians that will rock the church during 6 services Thursday through Sunday.

Every event is different and often calls for creative thinking/engineering. The building this church meets in has low ceilings and limited space up front where the musicians will be, so in order for us to provide lighting for the event, Rob came up with a way to put the lights right into the ceiling. He bought a piece of dry-erase board and cut it into fourths. Standard ceiling tiles are 2 x 4 so the board was exactly the right size to make four new ceiling tiles that would hold 3-4 par cans each. He drilled a small hole where each can would be attached and a slightly larger hole so the power cord could be hidden up inside the ceiling. I think he's pretty ingenious.

After the lights were ready, we loaded the truck:

The first thing we did at the church was to figure out exactly where the lights should go and remove the existing ceiling tiles. The custom-designed panels slipped right in and fit nice and snug.

The one Rob is focusing in this picture is called an elipsoidal and is used as a spotlight:

The lights look so nice that the church is considering purchasing them and keeping the tiles as permanant fixtures.

After the lights were in place we unloaded the audio stuff out of the truck:

While we were doing all of this, Gloria was off on another adventure making new friends:

Zach missed all the fun (and work) but was able to get most of his school stuff done.

I had to leave after the load-in to go to church, but it sounds like we are making pretty good time. Tomorrow we'll get all the speakers hooked up and pray that everything works like it's supposed to!!