NCC Pilgrimage 2018 is an annual youth event that brings 5,000 United Methodist youth and their adult leaders to the Crown Coliseum in Fayetteville, NC for a weekend of high-energy, concert-style worship sessions.
THE rAVe Agency’s Jacob Blount serves as the Communications Director for the event and has for the past six years. He explains how #AVisLIFE at NCC Pilgrimage below:
The weekend event consists of four sessions (Friday evening, Saturday morning, Saturday evening and Sunday morning). Each session consists of music from the House Band, testimonies, a keynote speaker and group performances. To read more about the event, ministry goals and programming, go here.
From a rental and staging production standpoint, the event is quite the operation (see below a picture of the final build).
Three displays across the upper part of the stage were used for both eye mag and program content (videos, slides, etc). The single display across the back creates an ambience effect and assists in program feed viewing for those seated on the floor. We used Christie projectors and AV Stumpfl screens. For sound, two Meyer Sound arrays connected those in the coliseum with the activities on stage. Multiple live mixes certainly kept the techs busy on their Yamaha consoles. The band and keynote speakers used a set of Sennheiser and Shure microphones. Video switching was key to the event as groups joined virtually via livestream (which we used an Epiphan Pearl to achieve). The livestream feed paired with the multiple screen layouts to allow for song lyrics, speaker slides and videos — all in addition to eye mag — was quite the job for the Barco S3. And there were probably 10 BlackMagic video converters. Program feeds were provided to the crew by an internal technical team, myself being a member of it, using Renewed Vision’s ProPresenter on a host of four Mac Pros and two Mac Minis. The stage was kept alive and bright by a combination of VariLite and Martin lighting products.
And to me, the most important part piece of equipment: the Clear-Com wireless belt packs.
It is always a true pleasure of mine to assist in the event by serving as the Communications Director and show producer. The NC Conference and NCC Pilgrimage events meant a great deal to me during my teenage years, and still do. And it is even better that my career now allows me to serve the organization with even more technical expertise than I had before.
I recommend checking out some of the 360 photos that were taken of the build, the workspaces and the coliseum itself. You can find those here. More pictures from the event can be found here.
NCC Pilgrimage and the NC Conference of the United Methodist Church were pleased to work with On Services to produce the event.
