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.
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
This stage set was a challenge because i was not totally sold on the idea. Idea after idea was passed around, and frankly to create a canyon on the stage was a bit out of my realm of experience. I love to try my hand at new things, but this was something that seemed a bit to big to tackle.
The first challenge was the series is about bridging relationships to your friends to lead them to Christ. What is the key word…bridge…and that is what illustration was needed on the stage, not just for someone to point and speak about because I could do that with projection, but a physical bridge to bring into a drama. It also needed to be built across the entire series (which is why you won’t see a totally completed picture up yet). Ok. So I needed to build a bridge on stage, first issue in my mind is safety. People are actually supposed to walk across that so I had to get my mind around how I was going to accomplish this without it falling apart, and doing it rather cheap. The bases had to be sturdy and not collapse inwards when weight was spanned between the two. We usually use Wanger riser platforms to start as a base for things, but I needed to be able to a) screw into it, and b) stabilize it well. The wangers didn’t fall under this category at all. So my mind went to these old camera stand platforms that were built and never used. They were built out of wood (so I could screw into them) and they were low to the ground and build solid. Low center of gravity and good construction = sturdy base that wouldn’t collapse. So I began to think about how the bridge would be pieced together.
Now came the next uh-oh. My task was to make the stage look like a canyon, but it couldn’t look cheesy (almost the exact words…that I was told). I’ve seen a number of ways to create rock looking facades but only a few of them looked half way decent, and I didn’t have the money to go out and buy spray foam and cover the structure with quickcrete. So after fighting logistics, I came to a plan to use chicken wire as my structure, and a dark brown “butcher paper” found out a local teacher supply store as my rock texture and surface. I glued in a little bit of moss from a craft supply store and viola instant rock surface.
<edit> One of the ideas was to take out the floor on the stage. It is built up computer floor pieces, so it comes out with a few screws. The only problem is it becomes an instant death trap…anyone accidentally falling in would end up impaled on the floor supports…yeah that’s not osha approved.</edit>
Take a look at the two albums to see what the rocks started as, and how I added to the stage to fill it out after the initial bridge base was constructed. I still included some projection to add a bit more depth, but it’s not shown in the pictures, (mainly because it’s a small, cheap projector and it doesn’t really look so good, it’s more to facilitate having lyrics on the stage for students who come to the front of the stage for worship).
Have questions? leave them…I’ll be glad to dive more into the process of the rocks and the bridge if you’d like.
Does your pastor have a ready room? A place where he sits and waits till he goes out, preps for his message, prays, changes, etc.?
Do you pipe a live feed into his room so that he can see what is going on out on stage? An audio feed?
Our pastor has a “ready room” and it is aptly labeled. This is a place he can come and prep for the three services he does on Sundays. He has his own refrigerator, sink, bathroom, couch, closet, etc. There is also a TV sitting on a small stand where he can view the worship service so that he is not late to the stage if he chooses to hang behind during worship.
Today I had to trouble shoot that TV and the live feed. I checked all of the feed hardware to make sure nothing had come unplugged, next up was the TV. It was a Westinghouse LCD TV, my guess is a 32″. I turned it on and was met with a black screen and a squeal from the speakers. That isn’t right. I swapped inputs, squeal stayed, i turned down the volume, squeal didn’t change…yeah definitely not right. I turned the TV off…the squeal lowered but was still there. Uhhhhhhhh poltergeist? We had a storm come through last Friday so I’m assuming that we had a power surge and it took out the power supply on that TV. We had an almost identical one so I swapped it out, everything works dandy but now I’m thinking a surge protector might be a viable option on that sucker.
How do you make sure your pastor gets from point a to point b? does he know? do you have a stage manager? do you have a morning pre-production meeting? What about special speakers, how does that work? who briefs them? the production director? the worship director?
