Faith Community Baptist Church has grown into one of the largest and most dynamic houses of worship in Asia. The vibrant spirit of this church was very much in evidence this August, when it hosted the G12 Asia Conference. Noted designer Nick Ho has been responsible for lighting G12 Asia since 2015. This year, he and his long-time collaborator Justin Poh took the event’s lighting to a new level of intensity and engagement with a 22-universe, multi-faceted lightshow that used over 500 fixtures. They ran the show on two ChamSys consoles: a MagicQ MQ500 Stadium and a MagicQ MQ100 Pro.
“Each year, I am excited to come up with different looks based on the stage design,” said Ho. “The G12 Asia Conference has a variety of things happening during the conference: there’s the walk-in moment, the worship performance, the sermon and preaching, the altar call, and the musical segments. We also have to engage the audience with lighting. Plus, everything has to look good on camera, so there are a lot of moving parts to consider.”
Ho’s dual ChamSys console arrangement helped him keep all of these moving parts working together smoothly.
“The MQ100 we used is my own personal console,” he said. “It’s something I have had and loved since 2005. My lighting partner Justin Poh used that desk to control the 138 fixtures that lighted the audience. I used the ChamSys MagicQ MQ500 (supplied by E&E in Singapore) to control the overhead rig and the floor fixtures on the main stage.”
To coordinate his busking with Poh’s work, Ho had the two consoles linked. “A very important function for us in this application was the Net Session Mode,” he said. “We used a master-slave sync and backup. Justin and I were busking much of the time. Most of the Worship part of the event involved busking for us. Some of the songs were programmed into our cue stacks, but we added busking for the effects from the faders and buttons.”
Another essential feature for Ho was the group of extra flashes above the faders of his MagicQ MQ500 Stadium. “There were 15 extra flashes buttons where I could put in many cue chasers and bump cues into it,” he noted. “I also liked the 4×3 execute flashes. I preset many look positions, colors and strobe effects on them. Plus, I really liked that the MQ500 has so many playback faders.”
Also coming in for praise from Ho were the MagicQ MQ500 Stadium’s Cue Stack features. “The ability to change from ‘Cue Timing’ to ‘Chase Timing’ with just a touch on the screen was very nice,” he said. “I also liked that there was a ‘Wait’ column where I could set timing to allow cue to follow on to the next cue.”
Ho started designing his lighting plot in Auto CAD. “Most lighting vendor and stage builders use CAD for paperwork, so we liked starting this way,” he said. Then, using the MQ500’s inbuilt visualization software, Ho and Poh quickly preprogrammed positions using the simple plot view, color and beam palettes, and cue stacks.
