Production Musings

The life that Jesus lived and the things he taught were totally backwards from the ideas the world held.  Today it’s no different.  Love the person one cubicle over who grates on your every last nerve?  (Don’t read too much into that Colin.)  This series explored the teachings of Jesus regarding things such as modern idolatry, human sexuality, what is love (baby don’t hurt me), family and a few others.

For those much farther along the lighting and design process that I am, I’d love your critique of our stage designs.  We always strive to do the best with what we have when it comes to stage design.  At the cost of $3.25 plus shipping per umbrella we created this.  There are obvious similarities to the previous design.  The idea behind it was to include a few subtle tie-ins to the series title.  Umbrellas belong outside but we used them inside and upside down.  Too cheesy?  :)  Hit them with some deep purple gel and really made them pop.  The rectangles in the back were supposed to be like falling dominoes, except upside down.  Only a few people connected that.  What would it look like to really do an upside-down stage design?  How could we have done it better?  I was personally pleased with how this one turned out.  It’s one of the most colorful/Dr. Seuss looking things we’ve done in a while.

Now, let the next stage design begin…

At Blue Ridge, Celebrate Recovery meets on Sunday afternoons. The purpose of CR is to help people work towards recovery from various hurts, habits, and hang-ups that life may present.  There seemed to be a myth floating around @_theridge that CR is for “those people,” usually referring to a drug addict or alcoholic.  (You may have even had the stereotypical image pop into your head as you read that.)  While CR is certainly a helpful tool for the drug addict or alcoholic, it actually covers far more life issues.  When you’re co-dependant and enabling, when you can’t seem to get a grip on your anger, past relationship hurts, past mistakes you wish you could take back, the inability to control your thoughts, sex addiction, fear, when everyone else seems to be the problem and well, I could keep listing them off.  When they asked for a short video promo to debunk the myth of “those people” and encourage people to come to an Intro to Celebrate Recovery I felt strongly about the purpose and accepted the task.  Here were our goals going into it:

• Make it fun and light
• Make it short and simple
• Make it relatable and non-threatening
• Make people want to come check it out

Tim Gosnell and I worked on it together.  We left space at the end for a text bumper containing information about the Intro to CR event.  Both of us are complete amateurs when it comes to video…so please, share your critique as we always are striving to learn and improve with how we communicate!

The big stage riser finally came down!  We struggled with how to best make the transition into this design from the previous and had a few goals in mind for this design as we began the Google Sketchup brainstorming.

• No strong thematic tie-in with the series topic needed
• Keep it simple and clean
• Make it cost effective
• Make it recycle-able

We decided on making several 4′x16′ rectangles made from 1/2″ sheets of pink 4′x8′ foam insulation board (Owens Corning or something similar) with no foil backer.  They were purchased from Home Depot. Sawyer and Sue Scott of Advanced Design Electronics here in Lynchburg assembled two 4′x8′ insulation sheets using a thin strip of metal (Band Iron strap for binding pallets, etc.) down both 16′ sides, trimmed both edges with plastic edging, and glued the middle joint with Quickset Gorilla Glue.  Each rectangle was painted with two coats of flat white paint to absorb the most color from our lights.  Glossy paint tends to reflect more light and although I suppose there’s a situation that calls for glossy, this wasn’t it.  All items were purchased from Home Depot and each rectangle costs less than $25 each to make.

Each panel was hung at an angle and braced at the floor and the lighting grid using the Band Iron metal along the sides.  (We left about a half inch excess at each end of the panel with a hole drilled in the metal.)

The cyc on stage left was made using a 30′x40′ piece of stock spandex
from I.Weiss. We were very fortunate with this piece of fabric.  I.Weiss had one in stock that had been returned from a customer because they didn’t realize it has a seam.  We were happy to accept a generous discount for such a large piece of fabric.  ($350)  We’ll be able to use this for video shoots in the future and many more stage designs we hope.  The frame was again thought of and constructed by Sawyer and Sue Scott.  It was constructed from standard metal conduit and ingeniously bent around a giant water tower to create the bend.  (Simple solution eh?!)  After some welding we we had a 16′x22′ frame safety cabled to the lighting grid.

For lighting, we used the Color Splits to wash the cyc.  An old starry gobo we found from a previous stage design from last year was also used on the cyc.  Each of the panels were lit with an ETC Source Four Jr. Zoom and were uplit with Par64 fixtures.  Additional photos and full size images can be viewed and downloaded at my Flickr.