I’m rethinking how to do this whole blog thing and I think for yours and my sake it’s going to be more short format. What are your thoughts on a blog from me? What kind of information do you want? I need feedback and I dont have anything to give away but my love 
So from here on out stage design posts are going to be picture in nature. I’m going to try and describe the process in the pictures for you, but as always ask questions!
Last blog I talked about building a wall with 2×4′s, foam board and drywall mud.When your drywall has cured you are ready to attach it to the frames. Lay it out first, square it up how you want it if your frames aren’t 100% square because lets face it no one is perfect. Then pick how you want to attach it. I just used decking screws to affix it straight no chaser, er washer. You could use a washer but it may pucker more. If you aren’t afraid of needing to disassemble your wall go ahead and plaster over the screw heads.
You’ll see in my sketches how I did the foot support for the walls. The two larger outer walls had feet inset and the center section had no feet but is screwed into the other walls for its support.
Now how do you get that rained on concrete look?
Lots and lots of messy messy paint.
Before I go any further please put down a giant painters tarp (preferably plastic) underneath your entire wall and I don’t mean tuck it in between it’s toes. Do whatever you have to to physically set your wall on the tarp otherwise due to the joints in the wall pieces it spills out and runs down the wood and onto the floor.
I used a 5 gallon bucket a quart of medium grey acrylic base paint and about 3-4 gallons of water. Mix well. Drop some black acrylic paint in for tinting and splattering. I used a roller to mix and do most of the painting.
Most of this is just time and layers. Do a base coat to tinge the wall light grey with the roller and then immediately go create large drips by pressing the roller against the top of the wall and let it streak all over. The messier the better, there is no wrong or right to how you do this. (you will be speckled grey too).
Do two to three coats like this, it will provide the base for your texture and you will begin to see it darken with each coat after it dries.
From here on out you have to feel out how your wall needs to look. I took a spray bottle with black acrylic and water and created darker drip lines down the wall. A rust color was used in the major joints with the black. @jasonwidney drilled holes every so often and did the same with the black and rust colors inside the holes and let it drip back out to create a kind of re-bar rust pattern. After the texture was complete we had students as part of the camp series paint the logo into the wall with a more bold red color.
Have fun, experiment and remember with projection and lighting your options are endless!
Coming up….
The stage design process from projection to lighting to sound.
Pre-sets aren’t just for automation any more, try one on your portable system!
A unique stage element with a unique story: The Bumper Cross.
Alright I’ve got a few things running through my head I need to post up on here. For right now I’m going to give you what is freshest on my mind, camp. This week long rawk out for the LYF Student Ministries happened at camp Tejas and serious planning began just a few months ago. Before I even knew what the theme for this years camp was I already had some killer ideas due to @jasonwidney. Stuff was bouncing around and I had several layout thoughts so i began to put pencil to paper and sketch them out. My initial thoughts were much different than the finished product but I couldn’t be more happy with how things turned out. I’m going to talk about the biggest piece of the camp set which was the wall seen in both the camp videos and on the stage.
So what you see there is a set of sketches. My initial stage design was to have rows of unistrut with coroplast panels offset inside of them kind of like the structure to the left. This would have created a backdrop that could have been lit or projected upon. I also had an idea for a wall from @jasonwidney’s blog to create a faux concrete wall in my head as well. I put both ideas on the table in a student creative meeting and both were accepted well. The deciding factor is that a video concept wanted students painting the logo into a wall. Well…you can’t very easily paint into that coroplast structure so I guess I’m creating a wall! Now how do I do that? The very next picture you’ll see is a wall concept to stagger some of the faux concrete panels to give some depth and texture on the stage. It would have looked pretty sweet (in my mind) but then I began thinking about the logistics of transporting a structure that was 10 ft high, 20ft wide and had the profile of a mac truck carrying a double-wide. So then you get the pictures of the structure I actually built, a flat wall with legs and supports.
Material and wall building set
Building the wall took about a solid week and I started with laying down about 10 gallons of drywall mud across insulation sheathing that I had measured out to take up a 10ft high by 20 ft wide wall (just shy of a 16×9 screen while maintaining standard 2×4 lengths). The amount of panels it took to do that were 2 times – 2.5 full 8ft widths and 1 time 2.5 4ft (cut down) widths. Yes that took 10 gallons of drywall mud and I probably could have slopped it on thicker. I did this with buckets of premixed mud and a 2ft drywall trowel. Be sloppy but a constrained sloppy. Concrete or other textured surfaces are not totally uniform or totally smooth. Thanks to my dad this process only took about 6 hours to cover the spans and about 2 days to fully dry (yes this process takes time).
Next I built the frame sections, two 10×8 sections and one 10×4 section that the drywall panels would be fixed to. Cross braces made the large frame more stable. If you’re not planning on moving it to much or supporting it from some other means then you may not need it, but i’d suggest it just for peace of mind. Put at least one cross support in the 8×10 to give your panels support I might suggest if you’re spanning wider to put in more, or do both horizontal and vertical supports. Again I was going for the lightest structure I could manage. Don’t forget as you’re cutting the wood, your measurement should be from outside to outside all the way around, take into consideration the actual width of your 2×4 for accurate size. Otherwise when you place your panels on you’re going to either end up with to much wood showing, or to much foam hanging over. Oh yeah when you’re purchasing 2×4′s (Which is what i built my structure out of) buy premium wood if you can and try and buy the straightest pieces otherwise making it square is a nightmare. Use safety when you cut the wood, level your saw if you can to get straight cuts, and never saw alone…if your hand goes missing it’s mighty hard to dial 911.
That concludes blog post one. I’m going to write these in a series over the next week or so because there is so much detail. I’ll explain the painting process for you in the next blog.
Alright so maybe it’s not a perfect circle but when the lights are out, and all you have is color you sure can’t tell!
So this next stage set was inspired by wind power (im trying to go green here). My personal goal for this set was to build something that could be generic and last through a couple of youth series. So after randomly being inspired by wind catchers and inset circles I decided to create my own moving piece of stage artwork. The only thing I had to purchase this time around was a router and bits to cut out some 4×4 sheets of corrugated plastic I had left over from a previous stage set (reuse and recycle, captain planet would be proud). photos here
I put the sheets of plastic on a piece of leftover board I had, found center, used a lawn steak as my arm, drilled through everything, inserted bolt. Ta-Da!! instant router guide to cut circles. I learned a few lessons along the way. A) make sure you’re also somehow bolted to the table your on, other wise it’s jump ‘n’ jive around the circle leaving you with a few bumps along the way. B) route multiple times BOTH directions to clear out the melted particle crud that the router forms. The blade is semi circular so it has an up path and a down path, and one way cuts smother than the other along the plastic. C) SOLIDLY fix your router to your guide whether it’s a lawn steak, 2×4 or whatever. I opted for the quick way out using a few zip ties so i could slide it around but that was a mistake. There should be a couple holes on your router for guide posts, use them. Also be ready to trim off any left over melted shavings, and if you stack multiples, rip them apart, wear gloves. Your hands will thank you later.
Stringing them together was a bit trick with waxy theatrical rope. It was a tad bit to thick, and kept getting bunched up inside. Make sure you experiment with a few things first. I tied knots after the top part of each section was threaded as my stop/pivot point. Then ran the string down through the center point on the bottom of each circle section. pictures here.
Then there is lighting and staging…and well you know how that goes. pictures
So there you have it, two stage posts in a week…pretty amazing if I say so myself…don’t expect it to keep coming.
The series the LYF student ministry is just coming out of was called “Real Love”.
It was a look at God designed relationships and how to remain pure in spite of an impure culture. Chris Wilson knocked the design out of the park after several conversations on how to take it directionally. We thought it would be cool to take it toward an old motel look. There were no solid discussions on why this particular direction was taken, but I’ll give you a small glimpse into my personal thought process on this one.
Culturally today we are bombarded with what true love isn’t. Movies, music, tv shows and even in school we see examples of what other people deem as real love. In fact real love according to many people is saying “I love you”. So apparently real love is also loving your favorite meal at a restaurant, or the new pair of shoes you just bought. My thought was, lets take this to what real love isn’t. A lot of times you see love portrayed in a movie as a one night stand in an old motel. BINGO! There is where the concept started.
So, I wanted to take the stage in the direction of a one night stand, well more particularly an old motel. Unfortunately, parents would have blasted us for actually portraying a bedroom on the stage, so I decided to go with a room ‘sitting area’ or ‘lobby area’ of the motel. Chris came up with the logo and I decided to make it real.
Dimension wise I made it just slightly bigger than the precut wood widths so that is why you’ll see the flattened edge on the physical sign, but it got lost in the black anyway. All I used was a projector, a sharpie and the occasional straight edge. Then on to jigsaw my way to the rough shapes of the sign. I cut it out in sections because again, the precut wood widths and lengths didn’t allow me to make a 10ft sign out of one piece. Yes I could have made the sign smaller but who wants an 8ft sign when you can have a 10 ft one? Besides proportionally I wanted to break the stage up into thirds and wanted the sign to take roughly one-third of the stage, the other two-thirds were for the motel area.
A little sanding to smooth it out, a lot of paint, masking out letters and texturing later and you’ve got a sign…now to 
make it work. Actually purchasing neon in the shape of the word love would have been really expensive and you would have had a one time element. So I set out to find an economical solution and boom, LED’s to the rescue. You can find these things through many companies, Rosco, etc. but this site has quick response, great customer service and a cheaper price per foot than most of them. This has the feel of neon and took the sign to that next level.
Then there was creating the hotel walls. Some 1×2′s and some masonite made the structure and about $60 worth of ugly wallpaper turned them into floating wall flats. Now to make it grungy, wood stain was the first thing that came to mind, i took a very light stain mixed it with a darker stain and used that as my base coat. Giving it that ‘been smoked in’ look. Then I took the darker reddish-brown stain that I used in the mix and ran it along the seams of the wallpaper while it was still wet so it spread out some and gave this water damaged, mildewed look. Nothing says one night stand like nasty wallpaper right?
The pictures on the walls were later added to explain the different types of love, eros – the physical ‘love’ (holding hands), phileo – the brotherly or friendship ‘love’ (group of friends), and then agape – the uncompromising marriage love (wedding).
No movers in this set other than a couple washes to color the stage during worship. I wanted this to be a stripped down, more theatrical look. So there you have it, a slight look into the process of creating a one night stand on stage without the bed.
LIGHTS, action, camo.
You can do a lot of things on your stage to give it some presence but if you don’t have it lit right or well you can ruin the look. Light has multiple functions, first is to give light on the subject so that the audience can see what is going on. This is incredibly important if you’re doing IMAG (image magnification). You want your subject to be well lit, no shadows or hot spots, and you want them to pop off of the background, especially if you’re against a black or dark colored backdrop.
The next, and most important responsibility of light is to paint the canvas of the stage with color. Color evokes emotion and so you must pay particular attention to how you color your stage. Here is a link to a site discussing color and emotion please forgive the post modern spiritualism crap weaved in. I don’t want to get into art 101 here, and im pretty sure you can google what emotions are evoked with each different color, and what colors go together with other colors. Also, match your backgrounds. Either choose a complimentary of lighting with your slides/lyrics used in worship or a matching color. You don’t want to end up with a puce on stage (a visual equivalent to the color of puke…). You can cover your stage with objects meant to be lit but until you add those strokes of color your stage doesn’t really become engaging or active to the worshiper.
Creating action in your lighting doesn’t necessarily mean using moving lights or chases programmed to timing of the music. While you can create motion using these effects you can create motion on your stage using static lighting. What I mean is highlighting the action points on your stage. Use solo lights. Use back lighting to create shadows. If you’re not using IMAG you have potential to do some very cool lighting effects during worship by back lighting your entire band and dropping out the front light. These silhouettes can create some amazing action on your stage and you didn’t even spend any extra money to get it. Just a few dimmer channels.
The reason I said camo in the title is that camo has depth. In order to create a great stage look you need to create that depth look with your lighting. No one wants to be bored or disinterested with what they’re looking at and most artwork that is extremely flat is not any fun to look at. It doesn’t evoke anything and does not engage. I’m not saying you need to have 500 colors on your stage, but having multiple colors and depth of shapes helps create shading and dimension. Speaking of camo, have depth to what you light. Layer fabric and texture for a unique look. I found a roll of shrink wrap backstage the other day and the thought occurred to me, why not hang that, pull and stick it together and then light that for a multi dimensional stage look. It’s all about lighting, texture and using what is available. If you want to use literal camo, do that too. go to an army supply store and buy up some of the tent camo to light (the white stuff preferably, or paint the green/tan stuff white).
Lighting can add a lot to your stage design with out adding any or little cost but is definitely something you need to go into with planning and purpose. Things can of course be done on the fly as you’re putting it together. Most of my genius inspiration comes on the fly . But a game plan works wonders in saving time while you’re setting stuff up.
…still to come (being ported over from my previous blog)
2. Projection is your friend.
Something that is coming up into church production is projection. If you’ve got the equipment to do some cool projection in your environments you have an inexpensive way to add some engaging worship elements. Of course the cost here is time in producing unique elements but you’re able to taylor each piece custom to your need. There is a whole new market of creatives that have begun to open themselves up to the church world. Worship VJ, video jockey – yes this is a throw back term to radio days…a disk jockey. This person is one who creates visual worship environments using projection in a space.
“The visual image is a kind of tripwire for the emotions.” Diane Ackerman
One growing form of this is environmental projection. Taking projectors outside of the confines of the screen and projecting on walls, sides of buildings, on people, across platforms, etc. A couple of people who are doing this well are Cameron Ware check out his blog on visual worship at http://visualworshiper.com/blog/ or Greg Dolezal & Stephen Proctor over at http://worshipvj.com
VJ (short for) :: Video Jockey (meaning) :: One who creatively captures and effectively communicates a specific message using a wide range still and moving imagery.
If you’re worried about creating a variation of staging elements, cost of materials or lack of creativity on the stage, but you’re knocking it out of the park on the video elements why not consider taking your strong point fully into the room. Imagery can help engage and enhance worship, and it is also a good idea to have the input of your worship leader/pastor. You don’t want to do something that detracts from the spirit of the song or moment. At the same time you may run into some pastors who are either not entirely creative or what you are trying to accomplish goes over their heads. In that case take care not to offend, but also take care to mold and shape their suggestions into something they can own during the set. I have found myself sitting during many worship sets across quite a few different churches where I scratch my head at the background selection. I don’t think that was the intended reception for it, but that is certainly what came across.
This is something you can chance regularly without much effort or expense so get creative with how you project and what you’re projecting. http://www.renewedvision.com/ has a couple pieces of worship software for the mac that has many different applications for the worship environment including a way to split images across multiple screens. I am by far no expert in this area, but am continuing to explore new ways to engage the worshipers in new ways.
“Designers can create normalcy out of chaos; they can clearly communicate ideas through the organizing and manipulating of words and pictures.” Jeffery Veen
I’m sorry that I’ve sucked at posting things lately… I either forget or don’t have anything to say.
We started a new series two weeks ago called Breaking My Chains. We’re identifying and helping students overcome obstacles/chains in their lives that keep them from being effective Christians.
With the new stage look I wanted something simple that looked cool, and could be a universal look beyond this series, to cover through the spotty Christmas schedule (we don’t have a ton of services planned through the holidays and it would be foolish to try and tear down and reset a ton during that time). So after having seen several stages effectively use wadded up aluminum screen door netting hung from the ceiling I figured I’d give it the old college try.
My efforts can be found here.
Personally I’m ecstatic with the way it turned out. There is so much texture and depth available with the lighting.
What else have I been up to? Well I took a Sunday off…GASP! During that weekend I went to Austin to just hang out, chill for a bit and I needed it. I also sprained my ankle pretty bad…how might you ask? I decided to NOT act my age and try riding a longboard . Yeah…how old am I again? 25? yeah…my body didn’t agree with what I was doing. So now I’ve got a little bit of a limp and a desire to command and conquer that longboard some day when I’m able to fully rotate my ankle.
I’ll throw some more of the shoe string stage design posts up here later.
-designing creative worship environments on a tight budget
(This series is re-posted from a previous blog site I had, I am at a lack for things to post on at the moment so I’m gonna filter these over)
I work for a youth ministry doing technical production and don’t always get the largest budget with which to be creative. I have to justify for every penny I spend because sometimes, the ideas I have are a little more harebrained than one might normally come up with. The designs have to be more engaging than it would be for an older demographic because kids are bombarded with incredulous stage designs and production values. You can’t one up music videos, MTV or VH1 music award shows, Miss America pageants, Good Morning America or American Idol. Thankfully you don’t have to. No one expects anything from the church which is a good thing…and an incredibly sad one. So the only limitations you have are set by yourself and whoever governs your stage design. Once you set a certain level of design you’re going to have to keep it up in one way or another.
The best way I can tell you to keep up your level of design, is surround yourself with creative people, resources, and when you buy materials buy multipurpose. Design stuff with a future use in mind because one day instead of going out to buy a gaggle of one thing or another you’ll already have something you can either use in lieu of, or along the same lines of what you’re initially thinking. Also if it’s a disposable material…try and get as many uses out of it as possible. Either incorporate it into your next design to keep costs down, or use it soon after. These are some ways to keep an air of consistency throughout your designs.
In these next couple of blogs I’ll talk about my design process and how to create some cool stuff with what you have and a little help from home depot.
1. Substance abuse or looking good?
The age old question, form (looking good) over function, or do you design for the series topic (the substance)? This is the first thing that I start throwing against the wall like cooked spaghetti and if it sticks I go with it. This is all dependent on what you’re asked for. Sometimes you can come up with some incredibly creative elements that fit your theme, and other times you can’t touch it with a ten foot pole. If you’ve got a series on relationships, there is a plethora of material you could use that would be either inexpensive, edgy or laying around your house that you could use to knock it home visually to your audience. If you’re allowed, a bed in the center of your stage could give a bit of the forbidden allure to the topic at hand. I’m pretty sure everybody has a spare bed somewhere in the church that you could manage to wrangle up there. One church in Ohio built a large heart-shaped bed in the center of their stage. Whimsical, edgy and communicative. What I decided to do was create four foot 3D hearts out of corrugated plastic, some lumber and our existing LED lighting fixtures which gave me any amount of color options I wanted on stage. A 4ft x 8ft sheet of this plastic was $10, it took two per heart and I created two. Lumber add another $25. So i created unique staging elements with a theme for around $70.
I’ve been amazed at how often those outside the discipline of design assume that what designers do is decoration. Good design is problem solving. — Jeffrey Veen
Not everything has to be with a theme though. Sometimes your creative layout can be with the way you stage your band, use your existing lighting, and maybe a few other pieces just to create a nice visual look. Ikea paper lanterns and bulb strands are an incredibly cheap, reusable and warm creative resource to give a homey, ‘cool’ look to your stage. You can vary your look too with different sized paper lanterns, and what I found is if you’ve got LED par cans just use the frame holder in the can, slip the paper lantern ring into it and viola you have a color changing paper lantern you can hang anywhere on your stage. I used these to create a homey ambience on the stage, but not necessarily adhering to a particular themed look.
Sit down with your team and decide if there is a particular creative element that will drive your series. It may be something small to accent your entire design that will make people stop and go wow. Sometimes even your theme or series can be lacking in the creative flow. This is a good time for you to make magic happen. Boost the creativity of the group by coming up with some crazy awesome stuff looks wise. Sure the theme may be lacking in creativity but that doesn’t mean you have to.
to come…
* Projection is your friend.
* LIGHTS, action, camo.
* Where do I find materials???
* I need inspiration, HELP!
* We’re a Church not a night club
