For a number of years, the name Oaks Christian has evoked exclamations from sports fans across Southern California and beyond. That will hap-pen when your teams dominate the local sports scene, your football team wins the California state championship and your starting quarterback goes to Notre Dame.
Last August, locals who had just seen the new 30,000-square-foot Bedrosian Pavilion, which includes one of the most technologically advanced performing arts centers and media production facilities in the area, uttered the name Oaks Christian in awe. Sports fans were especially pleased be-cause the performing arts center doubles as a gymnasium and will be used for the school’s basketball and volleyball teams. That these two venues are housed in the same two-story building on a 15,000-square-foot plot is equally amazing.
The Design
The Bedrosian Pavilion was opened after two years of thought, design and construction, reports Oaks Christian Vice President of Business Operations/CFO Paul Oberhaus. “We had the need for some gym space, and we always had the dream of building a performing arts center,” he says. “We started thinking about finding a way of combining them without sacrificing in either area, because it was going to be very expensive to build just a standalone performing arts center. So, we came up with this concept of making it multipurpose, but with really high-end performing arts and not compromising.”
Not compromising, indeed, considering the two-story facility boasts a stunning assortment of hardware and software to make any live performance come off without a technical hitch. The first floor includes classrooms dedicated to performing arts and theatre technology applications, including dance, choir and band rooms, a black box/green room, digital piano music lab and a media studio stocked with Digidesign Pro Tools and Apple Final Cut Pro. The second floor is the theatre and gym multipurpose room.
The budget for the entire project was $16 million and came from donations from Oaks Christian board member John Bedrosian and a number of donors who gave $1 million or more.
The center was designed by the architectural firm NTD Stichler Architects and built by Matt Construction. Kip Kibler of Kip Kibler Construction Management Services was brought in during the facility’s preconstruction to manage the performing arts side of the facility. In turn, Kibler brought in a handful of companies to help with the theatrical lighting and staging as well as the acoustic treatment in the building. Oaks Christian and Matt Construction tapped Edwards Technologies Inc. in Los Angeles, Calif., for the audio installation.
Construction
According to Ravi Shankar, ETI vice president of operations, this project was broken down into five distinct phases. The company handled all the cabling and patch panels in the first phase, outfitted the multipurpose and control rooms and the media studio during the second and third phases and then set up the classrooms during the fourth. The fifth, uncompleted, phase is the purchase of five High-Def cameras.
The cabling of the Bedrosian, reports ETI Chief Engineer Roger Goodman, was handled with great care. “Because of the ever growing speed of networking and HD, we have to handle cable differently, and a lot of A/V companies are probably not even aware of that,” he says. “It’s only start-ing to get to become an issue because we’re dealing now with a lot of data transfer, and when you deal with bandwidths of two gigs and above, you’d be very surprised at what will cause unbelievable amount of problems.” Included on that list, he explains, is the fact that digital cable cannot be tied down because any loop in a cable causes a notch, which over a long distance, will cause a loss of signal.
David Alexander, who serves as Oak Christian’s technical director/facility manager, points out there is very little copper going from the stage to the booth. “It’s all Ethernet,” he reports. “They decided to not go with much wireless because they could pull cable when they were designing the building from the ground up. The wireless snakes would have been a little overkill for this venue, since we were able to set up an infrastructure.”
Acoustic Challenges
In terms of acoustic treatment, the team installed heavy curtains down the long walls of the auditorium that measure 110 feet long by 75 feet wide and 24 feet high. Each curtain weighs 500 pounds and is moved via motorized controls. In addition to cleaning up the room’s acoustics, these curtains help differentiate the theatre from the gym.
The auditorium’s ceiling also provided a challenge, Shankar adds. “We worked in unison with the architect after doing some acoustical analysis predictions early on,” he says. “He had put some acoustic panels in there, but not enough, so he made sure the entire ceiling deck was acoustically treated.”
Once that was done, ETI started to look at boxes and points. Because a wide variety of pieces, including music, dramatic performances, dance and film, will be performed there, flexibility was the key. “They brought us 11 seating plans that they wanted us to be ready to set up for,” Project Man-ager David Archer reports. “The system turned out to be flexible enough that we didn’t have to have 11 configurations.”
Goodman says, “I think I went through eight iterations of facility drawings before they settled on the overall design. That’s the most I’ve ever done in my life as an engineer,” he says. “It was unbelievable. I think that it had a lot to do with the fact that the facility was expanding, and as they were putting things together, they realized that they could do this and try that. We gave them some restrictions, but for the most part, they had a free rein in what they decided to do.”
The final design provided a full surround sound field, so Goodman picked boxes that would accentuate that opportunity. Front left and right boxes are JBL VP7315 and VP7210s. There are also an additional six 7315s (two on each wall) positioned around the room. A center cluster is stocked with a pair of 7315s and 7210s and four VPSB7118DP subs. Monitoring on stage comes through six JBL MRX 512 Ms that are powered by QSC amps.
The 7315s can be controlled via separate DSP and sounds and can be steered through the sound field. This feature will be used during the school’s dramatic performances, including a presentation of The Diary of Anne Frank in November and Godspell this spring.
A Digidesign D-Show console is the highlight at front of house, located 18 feet above the finished floor. In fact, other than a pair of studio moni-tors, a CD and DVD player, a CD-R machine, patch bays and an intercom, that’s all that is up there. Both the audio and video signals can be split and sent to the media control room on the first floor. On the audio side, a live mix and a record mix into Pro Tools can be run independently. Video can be sent into Final Cut Pro and then sent back to the three HD-capable projectors in the main room. “Those two systems are married together, so there’s a lot of flexibility. We’re two steps away from being a broadcast studio,” Alexander says proudly.
Given the technical prowess in this venue, it’s sometimes easy to overlook the fact that the Bedrosian Pavilion is located on a high school campus. So, was there ever a consideration that this gear was going to be used by students? “Yes,” answers Shankar, “but as we talked to the school, one of the things they told us was that they wanted these kids to be more proficient [in audio and video] than anybody else out there before they hit college. They’re not at an entry level. They’ve used Final Cut Pro; they’ve used Pro Tools; and they’ve used high definition cameras. So, they know how to edit, mix and put things together.”
