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.
