To light the evening-bathed urban-decayed city, Scott used city light gobos and Source 4′s with color scrollers. Other looks were created using glass prismatic gobos and the scrollers. The scarlet chord draped on the wall was for the first message only (Rahab).

Finally, if you’re curious about their super wide screen above the stage, they had it custom made by Da-Lite.

The six home-made panels (shoji screens) are made of rice paper attached to plywood frames…lit with par cans. Then the 5 banners were printed on vinyl in-house. (Though your local sign company would love to print them for you.)

According to Livingston Okpakhalu Daniel, he used material like plywood, square pipes, transparent plastics, and an eye for details.

Because of their focus on recording and video production for the night, the stage design got put on the back burner. With that in mind, Joel went to the local hardware store and bought several fluorescent light covers and went to town. He linked three sections together by grommeting the corners and using threaded connectors. He then lit them from the bottom with MAC TW1s. (Though any fixture will do fine.)

10,000+ Christmas lights were hung behind the stage to serve as a back wall along with a variety of sized Wafer Wall panels. LED fixtures and projected gobos were shot onto the Wafer Wall panels to create an exciting, dynamic backdrop.

Each set of colored Christmas lights were controlled separately to allow them to disappear, or only show one at a time. Finally, fifteen white, 7-foot tall Christmas trees were also used and lit using LED fixtures.

The letters are made from plywood with a 1/8″ medium-density fibreboard face. For the graphic on the “O”…a vinyl sticker (or decal) was used. You can get these at your local sign shop (FastSigns calls them vinyl decals). All of the letters are 12 feet tall.

The pill bottle on the floor is a plywood frame with white plexi glass and a vinyl sticker on it with 2 led par cans behind it.

The light towers between the wave structures were boxes he salvaged from the Hunstville Airport updating their look. He then put plexiglas inside of them as well as LED bars. The top and the bottom can be different colors.

The choir risers also had the plexiglas in them to allow them to light up as well. Check out Todd’s blog for tons of inspiration.

For added special effects this year, they put together two shadowboxes made out of 1″ thick foam board.  Mike and his team mapped out their design and used a 1″ diameter drill to create the SUMMER SCREAM logo on the boxes. They then lined the inside of the boxes with wax paper to diffuse the light and painted the outside foam board black. Each box was lit with two more PAR64 LED’s.

The rest of their rig is:

• Mac with ProPresenter 4 and a TripleHead2Go to run three screens
• 6 iMove 250 spots
• 4 High End Studio Spot 250′s on trusses
• 4 High End Studio Color Washes that come in very handy for flooding the back wall with color
• 24 PAR64 wash lights to provide front and camera lighting
• All of their lights are programmed and run through Daslight Virtual Controller 2 software

This is one of their first stage designs at Faith Christian Family Church.

Check them out! http://www.mioculture.com/store/pc/viewPrd.asp?idcategory=7&idproduct=24

If you’re looking for fabric like this, check out Dazian or RoseBrand.

The windows were built out of a wood frame, the large ones being 10′ tall by 6′ wide and the smaller ones being 6′ tall by 4′ wide.  The window effect was created by using lighting gels cut out and taped together at their seems with black electrical tape.  When he lit them for the first time the gels were too transparent so he took pieces of spandex and stapled them to the back of the windows.  This essentially acted as a diffuser for the lights.  The windows were lit from the back using LED fixtures.  This traditional and elegant look not only worked really well for our Christmas services, but it also worked well for a wedding that had been scheduled.  The pictures shown were taken prior to that wedding which added the arch and candles.

Then they cut out the letters GOD in black fabric and placed them behind the white fabric. Simple.

Scott Avey from Grace Community Church in Indiana shows us their first theatrical set design attempt. (Pretty good, ya?) The set was accomplished using corrugated metal, shoji screens, acoustical panels, televisions, and LED lighting.

The corrugated steel panels were compliments of a team member who works at a farm silo manufacturer. They were cut from left over corrugated steel panels and lit from the ground. Then they added some shoji screen panels and some acoustical panels against the back wall and voila!

The LED lights were inexpensive Chauvet Techno Strobe RGB’s controlled by the Enttec USB Pro ($150) dongle plugged into a computer running Freestyler DMX (free).

Travis was able to simulate Versa Tubes using 2 extra projectors he had laying around combined with home-made screens made from PVC pipe. Check out the effect in this video:

To create a single image with 2 projectors, they used ProPresenter with the Matrox TripleHead2Go. The Matrox allowed them to split one signal to 3 different projectors. The tubes were created from 2″ PVC pipe into 3′ sections. Then, a 1/2″ hole was drilled on each side of the PVC and hung with a chain from the ceiling. Pretty cool effect, eh? Check out Travis’ blog post for a few more details and pics.

Using left over 2x4x6 foam blocks, they carved forms and layered the blocks on top of each other to for a sort of massive wave design. The wave was lit from the sides with Mac 250 washes with wide lenses.

The other main element was all of the truss work. They used 8 bits of 12″ box truss on stage, each with a coemar parlite inside for warming. They used coroplast, scored it on one side every foot and bent it around the truss.

As a bonus, check out their TV program at www.clcdenhaag.nl/tv. If you don’t speak Dutch and don’t know where to click, click on the orange banner graphic. You can see their stage, worship building, and their great band (singing mostly in English).

Thanks to Jozua van de Ridder for submitting the photos to the site!

Photo cred to Carlos Whittaker.

Carlos Whittaker was kind enough to post these pictures on his blog. If you’d like to share the techniques you’ve used to create something like this…please do so in a comment below. If you’re the guy responsible for this design…let’s chat!

Thanks to Jared for posting the how-to in a comment:
My name is Jared, and I am the Lighting and Scenic Director at Buckhead Church. Just to give you a quick rundown of this stage design. The city skyline was cut out of 4′ x 8′ sheets of a foam-core type material. We had a company with a CNC machine cut it for us (over 12,000 windows). We then glued vellum paper to the back side of the cutouts and lit that with LED strip lights. The backdrop was a fiber-optic star drop that was rented. Since we were going for a “Christmas in the City” feel we didn’t want to use christmas trees. Instead we purchased different sized trees from a local nursery that were all dormant.

1′ box trussing was used to separate the waterfalls and provide structures from which to hang the fabric. The fabric was bunched to a 5′ width at the top and then fanned out to 9′ at the bottom to create a soft flowing look.  Both the cross and the fabric were up lit with LED fixtures giving flexible color options. Enjoy!

Each strip of Weed Block was lit from the top and bottom with LED fixtures.

The design also included 6 free-standing truss towers which were covered with Twin-sized bedsheets from Walmart…and spray painted with flat black paint laid on with a large broom.

Finally, for the three screens he used three 2000 lumen Hitachi CP-A52/100 that allowed him to project onto a 7.5′ x 10′ screen from only 3 feet away! Using his MacBookPro, ProVideoPlayer, and TripleHead2Go he was able to rear-project some great worship visuals on the screens without having to hang projectors everywhere.

Check out Camron Ware’s blog post for more pictures and more details on the conceptualization.

The risers are various heights (6’, 4’, and 2’) of basic 2×6 and plywood construction. They’re wrapped them in spandex and trimmed with Luan which was overlaid with vinyl diamond plate steel deck tape. To light the spandex walls of the risers, some Martin DC-1 decorative ambient lights were used to create movement inside the boxes. To add the next level of cool to the stage, the bass drum head and laptop on stage were wrapped with a dark diamond plate pattern to match.

He created 5 frames that were 36″x90″ and 6 frames that were 24″x36″ made from 1 1/2 inch studs. He then scattered them around the stage and  backlit them with LED lights.

Download the zipped design files for the paper panels here. Also, if you’re finding these useful, go ahead and Paypal his ministry a couple of bucks for some new equipment at patrick@patrickfore.com.

Check out Patrick Fore’s design portfolio and website.

The design uses five 4-point spandex shapes.

• 2 blue 8′x12′
• 2 white 10′x10′
• 1 white 16′x12′

The wash lighting on the spandex was accomplished using 10 Colorblast 12TR and the light shapes were accomplished with gobos from 4 Varilite VL2500 Spots.

Her original goal was to use real trees on the stage, but ended up settling with “L” shaped planter boxes on each side of the stage. The planters were made from boxes fitted with a very shallow inside, in order to easily “fill” the box. They used white rock with oriental looking floral pieces found at River Pottery and Pier 1 imports (Pier 1 was the least expensive resource). The outside of the boxes were covered with wire mesh material from Michael’s.

At World Market she saw a two tall cranes for $16 each and used those inside the planter boxes.

Finally, the gong was made from an old large water heater pan. She it with a hammer, faux finished it and then her friend Tony made the wooden part to make it look very authentic!