Diversified and its work at Passion City Church at Trilith has been recognized as the 2024 Commercial Integration Award Winner for Best House of Worship Project!
Passion City Church, born of the Passion Movement — a decades-old movement among young adults aged 18 to 25 years that began with a stirring in the hearts of Louie and Shelley Giglio — has grown to become a culture-shaping church where Jesus is the lead story. In addition to locations in the Atlanta and Washington, DC metro areas, Passion City Church is part of an organization also behind the present-day Passion Conferences and Six Steps recording label. Songs and messages created out of this movement have impacted people all over the world.
Having partnered with Diversified for years, the ministry turned to the technology solutions provider once again to help them establish a unique new location in the Trilith community outside Atlanta, home to one of the largest movie studios in the country. The goal of the new systems centered around ensuring a fresh, inspiring experience for every attendee. The challenge: the environment would be located within a large Soundstage on the Trilith campus, requiring a unique approach in both audio and visuals to create an engaging, immersive environment.
The fresh approach by Passion City Church paired with the technical expertise from Diversified resulted in a shining beacon of both form and function.
Addressing the Main Challenge
Diversified reveals it was an original partner in the construction of the first permanent gathering site at 515 Garson Drive and the second permanent gathering location in the Cumberland suburb of Atlanta.
When the time came to construct the Trilith system, Passion City engaged the Diversified team again. The Passion team is unique because they have several experts on their production team, and they knew they needed the right partner to achieve their production goals. Diversified was trusted to support their exact vision at a very granular level, developing solutions that represent several firsts in the church production world.
Passion City holds themselves to the very highest standards, often executing services on Sunday with complexity that would make a professional production crew’s heads spin, all with the most dedicated team of door holders ever seen. The teaching pastor often preaches from any of the Atlanta locations at a moment’s notice. Live-linked moments or even baptisms, going back and forth round-robin style between locations, are the norm, and the worship you experience online may be from a different location than where the live message originates from. The production team adapts in both pre-production and in real time at the highest levels.
The new systems at Trilith brought a unique challenge to the relationship between Diversified and Passion City Church — all of the systems needed to be designed and executed in a portable touring style as the venue is a leased space and the campus would likely relocate in the future.
Installation Details
Photo credit: Tim Corder
The artistic mastery of Passion City’s creatives designed a unique, inspiring visual experience that is both parts simple and complex centered around 480 panels of Unilumin URM III 3.9mm LED video in front of a very large white cyc with rich color wash. At the heart of the audio system is a d&b KSL loudspeaker system, Digico audio consoles, and Shure wireless. The loudspeaker system is one of the first to utilize d&b’s Soundscape 360 system. The room is anchored by the main KSL system and supplemented by a collection of d&b Y10P point source boxes around the seating area to add artificial acoustics to an otherwise extremely dead acoustic environment.
Early reflections during spoken voice, keys pads, gang vocals and reverbs, all utilize this system to enhance both worship and spoken voice and make the attendee completely forget about the otherwise challenging acoustic environment.
Building such a complex system on the heels of a global pandemic created multiple challenges with supply chain and product availability. Diversified partnered closely with the client to manage and streamline the timeline of the project as much as possible.
In addition to the incredible visuals and immersive audio, the lighting system is based around a Grand MA 3 console, Pathway Pathport streaming ACN lighting control, and a mix of Martin, Elation and GLP fixtures as a standard rep plot that is supplemented with rental fixtures according to the demands of particular events.
The video system is comprised of a Ross Video backbone in routing and switching, Panasonic Varicam cinema cameras with a mix of Canon and Fujinon lensing, Vinten tripods and Multidyne SMPTE fiber backs, Renewed Vision ProPresenter GFX systems, Riedel Bolero intercom, Disguise media servers, and Riedel Micron for campus interconnect over dark fiber.
Positive Client Feedback
The client has been thrilled with the results of this project. All along, there was tremendous pressure to deliver a world class environment that targets creative attendees, many of which work on the largest Hollywood blockbuster movie productions during the week, attending Passion City Church at Trilith on the weekends as their home church. It was critical that the new campus provide a distraction free, inspiring environment that points to Jesus and allows the technology to blend into the background.
According to Diversified, the new church location of Passion City Church has grown leaps and bounds since it initially launched and other church creatives all across the country continue to look to this space as inspiration for pushing the boundaries of what is possible in a black box space.
