DennyWeinman.com

I figured I would post a bit about the process I took to get to this stage.

The theme, live in 3D. The concept was to convey 3D through stage elements to the students, and what better way than to create giant pairs of 3D glasses on stage. They couldn’t be stagnant figures though, they had to have some kind of action so every eye hole had a screen. Now don’t ask questions about the theme, it was what I was given, and wasn’t communicated well at all. It all came together in the end though.

I like to start out with sketches so that I know what I’m working with. I lost my original stage layout design in the process of putting it all together. Over on the right is a to scale drawing of a real pair of 3D glasses. I just scaled them up so that the perspective would be somewhat right. Unfortunately once we started building them  we had to change the dimensions slightly. The TV’s (yes we used tube TV’s that were laying around gathering dust) were not eye hole dimensions so those got scaled back, and we wanted to make sure the glasses on the floor were tall enough to cover the front of the stage platform. The ear pieces weren’t necesary but they were a nice finishing touch to the whole set.

I had a few great volunteers to help pull this off because there is no way I would be able to actually execute every part of the stage myself. They followed the layout great, their glasses actually turned out better than the ones I cut myself, not that I’d ever actually tell them that . I had a couple other student volunteers come in later in the week and help with the wiring of the whole set up and lighting, and they knocked it out of the park. The glasses were made out of left over corrugated plastic we had used for screens in previous stage sets, so it cost nothing really to create these stage pieces. Later in the process I was given the task to create a stage set within the stage set. We had a secondary section of the conference to raise awareness of world hunger. So i set out to sketch and create a small 3rd world looking hut, and ‘shipped’ supplies to help feed the hungry. Everything was created out of available materials and some white spraypaint. A very cool look came out of very little.

One of the finishing elements that were used a couple of the nights were videos of eyeballs looking around put in all of the screens. It was just kind of a cool after thought to take the whole thing to the next level and added a bit of fun and whimsy. The big pair of glasses at the top of the stage were rear projected on a screen that were stretched with small construction clamps and some gaff tape to hold the screen to the glasses and create tension. Black garbage bags were used to block the projection through the nose piece.