DennyWeinman.com
musings and mishapse of a technical creative
Tagged with Stage …
VBS at the Beach
This summer has started off CRAZY, and by crazy I mean crazy awesome. I have been stretched in ways I didn’t think possible, but this is a good thing. Since joining the children’s team I have gotten the pleasure of being creative visionary for VBS this year.
String Theory
We have a Youth Leadership Conference / Missions experience going on right now here in Houston, Texas and my instructions were to create a cool stage.
Man…I wish constraints were always so fast and loose!
Simple Stage Elements
I meant to post something about this up a while back!!
Variety is the spice of life, and so is creative interpretation.
Camps come and go, services come and go and we all use some element of the cross within it. For special occasions we use a physical cross, whether nailing sins and confessions on it, or laying things at the foot of it, or simply a striking remembrance that the forgiveness we’ve received had a price.
What doesn’t change that often is the two beams that get put together to look like a cross. So here is a different take on it.
This cross was going more for an urban feel with camp. I had a former student who’s parents had connection with a scrap yard and so after a few phone calls we had some pieces to create a unique element at no cost.
No welding required…but it did require a strong drill. I burned one out and almost didn’t get it complete.
Resources are always available around you, and the more you’re able to involve others the better. This didn’t take a creative genius but it did take some convincing to step out side of the box and NOT use a traditional wood cross.
If you have the liberty and trust to take some projects to the creative extreme, and maybe to the abstract, play around. Use different materials, call around ask volunteers etc. I just found a brother in law of a co-worker who takes down fences, viola! Instant super weathered wood to use for another project in the works.
Don’t be afraid to try something new, or experiment a little!
Boxed In
The new series we started this week at LYF is called My Messed Up Family and to be honest a lot of what I’m leaning towards design wise for the stage has been more general purpose than series stylized. I enjoy those heavily stylized pieces but it’s kind of odd when your stage is branded for something and you’ve got another event going on in your auditorium!
I’ve always been intrigued by the concept of using the stage as your canvas for abstract art. I’ve seen stage designers like Jason Widney do art pieces with some abstract meaning that just look plain awesome. So it was my desire to bring some art and beauty to the stage with this feature while keeping a little bit of abstract meaning. I tossed around a few ideas pre-Christmas to build some light columns out of some coroplast and 1x2s and was met with a little bit of resistance because it didn’t fit the theme as well. So back to the drawing board of my mind and I began to build upon the idea of using basic geometric shapes to build a complex thought on stage. We were talking about the foundations of family, the basic building blocks if you will. So the idea took off to build intertwined cubes.
Still using similar material to what I was going to build the columns out of I started figuring out scale etc. The 1×2′s come in 8ft lengths so I figured that cutting them in half and creating 4 foot cubes would be plenty epic enough to fill the stage. Now how many to actually build? they’re big! I settled on thirty which seemed like a daunting number but realistically once they were all hung interconnected was just about how many i needed. Now how to construct them. As you look through the photo set on flickr you’ll notice the first sides of the squares are interlocked. I used a half inch straight router bit and routed each piece of those with a notch so that the pieces set inside each other. This helped add strength since they are so large. I placed some wood glue and then used a nail gun with finishing nails to hold them together. After the glue set they were solid. The side pieces were the iffy ones. the router bit I bought did not fit my router so instead of routing out an inch and a half notch and applying the support on the sides 
I had to do a half inch notch in the top which was not quite as stable as I’d hoped but with wood glue and nails I achieved enough stability that they could be hung. I left one rung out of each cube so that I could interlock them all together then used the nail gun to finish them off.
Tie line worked great to hang the majority of them. I used safety cable to hang the first few to give a stronger base.
The hardest part after getting the first row hung was figuring out whether to go symmetrical or not. I chose not symmetrical and after that it all started falling together rather quickly.
This project took about two days from start to finish and material cost was around $200 as long as you have the router, chop saw etc.
Two-Fifty Tuesday
Alright so last week was a blur and a blast.
I kicked it up at the gym 6 days last week, only taking a day off because my body was just beat up. I also kicked out a rockin’ stage design for the new year. I’m gonna post a couple pictures now and then write a blog post very soon on how I accomplished the look.
I’ve also been cooking a ton so that I don’t eat out as much, saving money and saving myself grief in the gym. It’s great except my apartment constantly smells like food. This is a good thing and a bad thing all wrapped up into one. Mainly bad though, because it makes me think of food often.
I’m back in the grind of work now, bustin out two positions worth of work until we hire a new staff member. 
It’s cool for a while but I’m hoping one or the other doesn’t suffer greatly until we’re able to repopulate the team! The meeting days are killer for productivity though. Hey lets sit in a room and talk about nonsense for hours. Thanks, I guess it gives me time to blog…wait did I just admit that online?
Lastly I’m praying for a new work to be started in me. Not sure what or how this is going to look like in the future but I’m ready for a fresh fire. God is constantly at work you just need to be open and willing to see it.
Masking and you
Our Christmas production had two parts a drama and a concert. The drama had some nice set flats that were not all squares or straight lines. Pro-Presenter 4 has a nice new feature called props that you can use as a mask layer with black rectangle objects. This is awesome until you start running into angles. You can rotate your boxes until you hit the right slope but because it isn’t a real time draw it’s going to take you hours just to get one angle correct.
My quick and easy solution for this is using some kind of vector drawing software to draw your mask over top of your set. I downloaded an After Effects trial onto my presentation machine and drug my view window into my projection area. Unless you’re running SDI out you cannot use your second monitor as a “video preview” which would be ideal. So I just worried about correct aspect on width and figured I would fill in height with the square prop objects later. As long as I had the top line of angles taken care of everything else would be simple.
I took the pen tool and rested the edge of the pen on the edge 
of the set and followed its top all the way across. Not including download time this took about 10-15 minutes to get right and then I exported it as a single frame tiff with alpha channel. I imported it into Propresenter 4 and was able to either use it as a foreground image to mask over a background image (which is what I did because I had several masks to use and didn’t want a global setting, as we were also clearing the set for a concert and wanted to remove steps for confusion). You can also set it to a prop layer which gives you a global mask that will stay in place regardless of the background or text you put up until you clear it.
There is also a new feature that Renewed Vision released that is a permanent mask layer that cannot be cleared away unless you go into the settings and clear it out. This is an awesome option for a permanent installation of environmental projection! I’m still not entirely sure of the option of using anything other than square objects native inside propresenter so the vector artwork as your mask may still be the best option here as well. (I cannot find anything on their site documentation about how they are doing their detailed masking).
I will tell you what. I have really come to love the versatility of Renewed Vision’s software both ProPresenter and Pro Video Player. If you’re a church I would seriously consider it as your presentation software, especially as it has crossed platforms making it a more viable solution for churches who cannot afford the transition to mac or don’t want to leave the familiarity of the PC platform.
What have you done in Propresenter or like software to do some wicked masking? techniques?
Perspiration
“What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing.” – Aristotle
I guess the biggest thing I can say here is trial by error. You sit and dream for a short while and then regardless of whether every inch is planned out you get a move on. Unless you’re planning on using an object for a while there are lots of ways to fake the way something looks, if you’re only going to see two sides of an object, only build two sides. Build it as light as possible and reuse as much as you can to keep your costs down.
You’re never going to know whether you can accomplish something until you set out to do it and I think that is the most important part of perspiration. You can stand around and talk about something. You can get as much input as you can from people but until you pick up the hammer, paintbrush or staple gun you’re not going to know whether or not you can accomplish it or not. Sometimes you get knee deep in a project and find out it won’t work as well as you had hoped. This is the time where your ingenuity and critical thinking skills come into play. Yes those critical thinking assessments you took in middlschool and highschool and on the SAT and ACT were not in vain.
If you don’t ever have challenges to your critical thinking skills then you need to start stepping out on some limbs. If your projects don’t leave you scratching your head for a good long time at least once then maybe you need to start stretching yourself more. Develop yourself so if you end up hitting a wall you can break through or start heading in another direction with what you’ve got.
These are sweat inducing situations because if most creatives are like I am, a lot of what we do is up against a tight time frame and if it doesn’t work out exactly right it can get a little hairy. This is where you need to be on your A-game.
So be ready to jump in with both feet, be ready to fail, be ready to try something new, be ready to stretch yourself, be ready to perspire, but also know your limitations and surround yourself with people who can compliment what you do!
Inspiration
Thomas Edison said something to the fact what invention “boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.” (source)
I’m going to write a couple short blog posts on inspiration and perspiration over the next week. In relation to creating stages for worship. I will say that Edison has it right when he says that its only one percent inspiration, but that one percent is the catalyst for everything you do.
I personally don’t spend a ton of time researching and diving into inspiring stuff because it is all around you. Let others inspire you, there are tons of other great creatives out there who are doing the same thing you are beating your head against the wall with. Ask them questions about what they did and adapt it if you like it. Another resource is tapping into creatives in your church. I’ll bet you’ll find a few untapped super creatives in your congregation that could help you with your stage designs and builds!
Other inspiring forces include but are not limited too, nature, music, art, Home Deopt, necessity, architecture, movies, or concerts. Yes Home Depot. Every building material you need is in there and sometimes when you need something you can’t find, just wandering down it’s aisles can give you that right piece of inspiration.
Necessity can be an inspiring factor as well. Sometimes you have a pressing deadline to either come up with an idea, or find a solution for a prop or stage that is just not coming up by itself. The last post was on a quick stage prop I built. You can find candle stands in most home goods store but not many tall ones, and not many options that fit with a stage look you may have. So out of necessity, because I had nothing I liked, I built my own by wandering through the aisles of my favorite store Home Depot. (I had to go in there because I lost my man card going into stores like Michael’s looking for pre-made ones)
Now that being said…don’t spend to long being inspired because other wise you’re not going to get anything done.
Next up: Perspiration, or Sweat It Out
