I’ve been asked a few times for a step by step instructional on how to make the “Response Stage Design” I posted a while back. So without further delay, my first blog entry in 8 months starts now:

Step One: Determine your height and width
How much space do you have to work with? Be sure to consider different viewing angle of your room. If at all possible, make it easy on yourself and keep the height divisible by 2 and the width divisible by 4. It doesn’t have to be exact, as you’ll see later, but it does need to be within a few inches. It will make your life easier.

Step Two: Create a materials list
Now that you know the dimensions of the total design, do some math on constructing a 2×4 frame. The dimensions of the frame equals the dimensions of your design. 2x4s are generally sold in 2′ lengths up to about 22′ or 24′ if I’m not mistaken. Don’t quote me on this though, I’m no lumber expert. In our case, we went with 16′ verticals so that 8 rows high will work very easily. When calculating materials: the vertical studs need to be placed on 4′ centers. You’ll have to do some math based on your specific design as to how many of these you need.

Wooden dowels or small 1x2s are used to protrude one end of each coroplast panel. We used 1x2s because they are easier to work with and we cut them to a 12″ length.

Our material list was as follows:
• 88 2′x4′ panels of coroplast, round it off to 90 or 95 to account for mistakes. We order 4′x8′ coroplast and then cut them to 4 pieces of 2′x4′.
• 16 16′ 12 for vertical 2x4s and 4 for the top and bottom of the frame. BTW, 2 of the verticals count as the left and right side of the frame.
• 2 12′ 2x4s for the middle portion of the top and bottom of our frame. This will vary based on your design.
• 176 12′ 1x2s – bought in long length and cut to size.

Step Three: Construct the Frame
I’m skipping some obvious steps of ordering or picking up the materials, gather construction tools and planning out the design with your volunteers or staff.
The verticals are, again, spaced on 4′ centers and go inside the top and bottom 2x4s making up the frame. So that your total frame height will actually be 4″ taller than the height of your verticals. For us, our total frame dimensions were 16’4″x44′. For us the extra 4″ is fine because we planned to paint the bottom of the frame black and start the panels 2″ from the floor or the bottom of the first panel meets the top of the bottom portion of the frame. I hope that makes sense so far. The leftover 2″ on the top of our design are also painted black and aren’t noticed because of the size of the design. If you really need it to be exact, consider cutting 4″ off of each vertical.
Measure everything out and assemble the frame on the ground. We assembled our entire frame on the stage and then raised it into position with several people. 2x4s are hardly ever square or straight. Don’t let this bother you as long as you’ve made sure to install them on 4′ centers. You can fix some of the crooked verticals as you install the panels as needed.

Step Four: Safety Safety Safety
I can not stress this enough. Make sure that you are operating safely through the whole process but now is when you must be aware of what’s happening around you. Do not lean, prop, or tilt the frame onto anything else. It must be anchored to your stage well before you may continue. Here’s what we did:
• Screw bottom of frame directly into stage floor
• Used additional 2x4s to build braces from the sides and back of the frame to anchor into the back walls
• 45° legs on the back side
• Safety cables from the top of the frame to anchor points in your building structure.
You must make sure that there is no possibility of the frame ever falling over.

Step Five: Add Panels
Starting from the bottom, staple one side of each panel to the vertical studs. Alternate sides as you add panels or use the same side whichever you prefer. Be creative. Some of the spacing may not work precisely and that’s ok. It’s a big stage design. It won’t be noticeable. At this point you may need to tweak a few vertical studs if they are crooked. Add the 1x2s or dowels to the non-stapled side of the panels. Because they are cut to 1′ lengths, they should protrude the panels to approx. 8″ from the frame. They are installed at the top and bottom corner of each panel and one end of the 1×2 should align with the back side of the frame. Make sense?

Step Six: Light and Enjoy a Cherry Coke Zero

Our panels were not rolling. Each is screwed to the stage floor and braced.

I removed myself from the design process for this one…since I was going to be getting married on this stage I didn’t want to have biased input. (We have a policy at Blue Ridge that the stage design doesn’t change for weddings.) The layout and design worked well for stage flow and, when lit, offered some good looks on camera.

We’ve had a few stage designs go by and I wanted to share them with you. We just finished up a series called “Free.” It was a very powerful series looking at what it means to be free. Here was the conceptualization for this design:

and

The idea with the platforms was a little risky and went through several variations before we settled on this. For the backdrops, we used landscaping fabric and Colin splattered/brushed white paint on each one. Photos coming soon!

To mimic the series graphic (see previous post)

We just began an 8 weeks series addressing what it means and does not mean to worship. “Our church culture often defines worship as a specific time during a Sunday morning service that consists of some praise choruses, or perhaps a specific music service that occurs during the week. Certainly, that is one way people connect with God. But, we may be limiting ourselves by missing some of the most valuable meanings of worship. It was never intended to be a simple activity that we perform but something much broader. In reality, it was not even supposed to originate with us.” – BR Teaching Team

Tim conceptualized this design to use offset 2′x4′ pieces of white coroplast. The idea was to use 16′ vertical 2x4s on 4′ centers. We would staple one end of the chloroplast to the stud and the other end would be offset approximately 8″ from the stud. I modified our original 3d models to illustrate the assembly in a way much better than I can describe:

Tim, Colin and Todd will attest to how difficult I can be to work with at times. I tend to over think and over analyze details of ideas or concepts and immediately move to “what are the potential problems with this idea?” or “can I immediately identify challenges we’ll need to consider ahead of time?” when brainstorming. Talk about a Debbie Downer for the creative process. In this case, I was worried about the 12″ spacers creating undesirable shadows when downlit and I was also worried that the spaces between the panels wouldn’t look right. For both cases, I was wrong. In hindsight, I think the shadows and spaces played to our advantage once we got color on it.

The entire structure is braced to the back wall and safetied. For sidelight we used the AC Lighting Color Splits (one per side), 5 High End Studio Beams above it, 6 ETC S4 Jr for band backlight and 5 S4 Jr Zooms for Vocal frontlight. Fresh pics to follow….

About the design:
- We wanted something warm
- We got the lanterns from The Paper Lantern Store (along w/ 15′ cables)
- Used 40 watt bulbs
- For power distribution, we found a great 12 outlet distro at Harbor Freight for $20. We replaced the ends from Edison to Stage Pin and it worked like a charm.

Between the 15′ extensions and the distros, we should have a really nice setup for future designs when we want to incorporate lots of dimmable incandescent fixtures.

The response to our experimenting was overwhelmingly positive. Our executive pastor told me, “Out of all of the technical things we’ve ever tried, I haven’t received as much positive response to anything as I have the center screen.” Despite the way we bootlegged this setup, people seemed to like it. The number one comment we received was that it was “much more engaging being able to look straight ahead rather than off to the side.” It was a technical learning win as well. While we were in the planning stages, someone asked me if it was going to turn out ok. I responded, “I have no earthly idea. It could be successful or we could fall flat on our face.”  Either way we would have learned something.

As far as changes to the set, we did away with the angled truss, joined the ends and made one nice long straight piece of truss from which to hang the projectors. We measured their placement and distance as best we could, 8′ apart and 15′ from the screen if memory serves me correct. VGA was supplied to each projector fed by a Matrox TripleHead2Go. Our operating resolution was 2400×600 and our screen was about as homemade as you can get.  Todd used thin finishing boards as a flat surface and a half inch frame around the back.  In addition we used two 20′ battens secured to the frame to give us rigging points.  To finish it off we wrapped it in spandex.  We love spandex, can you tell?

My Macbook Pro drove the whole system from stage left after we discovered that the Matrox doesn’t appreciate having a 100ft VGA extension between it and my laptop. (It is supplied with a proprietary cable that must be between the computer and itself.) If any of you understand why that is so, feel free to educate us! To control my laptop and be with the rest of the tech crew, Colin screen shared it over our network and it worked like a charm. Overall, we didn’t have any major issues with screen sharing although we would not recommend this method for anything other than a short term experiment.

Here are a few solid things we’ve learned from this project as we look to do something more permanent:

1. We shouldn’t make our own screen. Fluctuating humidity and temperature causes wood to warp. Even over 5 weeks, noticeable image distortion could be seen.

2. Brand new projectors and new lamps are a must. As projectors age, so do their LCD panels. Color and brightness should match as closely as possible. The provided photos illustrate the color/brightness differences.

3. Edge blending is a must if you desire smooth transitions between projectors. We’re considering Panasonic projectors because it’s built in and hard to beat the quality.

Propresenter worked very well in controlling the display. As we consider a longer term solution to a center display we feel strongly about Renewed Vision’s product in terms of reliability and quality. Special thanks again to Lester Hamrick of Just Right AV for the use of his projectors and volunteering countless hours as well as Mark Hudson for giving several days worth of his time during this stage design and for his faithful service over the last several years.

]]> http://productionmusings.com/2010/01/13/collide-series-part-2-2009/feed/ 0 http://productionmusings.com/2010/01/12/collide-series-part-1-2009/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss http://productionmusings.com/2010/01/12/collide-series-part-1-2009/#comments Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:00:10 +0000 Andrew Hunt http://productionmusings.com/?p=402 Several weeks ago we kicked off the last series of 2009: Collide. Todd and I had been tossing around the idea of doing some slanted floor risers so we thought we’d finish up this year by giving it a shot. As a matter of fact, “give it a shot” became a pretty popular phrase/idea within this last series. We did alot of new things we’d never tried before. We tried new lighting angles with the funky lighting bolt truss idea. We tried the moving lights from stage positions. We tried slanted stage risers. And we also tried Rosco 02, Bastard Amber. It’s not what you think! It’s a popular front light gel to make things a bit warmer. Let’s begin with our original Google Sketchup drawing of the design idea:

I think this may have been the first design that we’ve successfully integrated the Studio Beams from the stage floor. If my memory serves correct, I was a little unsure of the results of using them from this position. I was afraid of losing some flexibility of creative backlighting. Thankfully, Colin and Tim challenged me to give it a shot and looking back I think it’s safe to say that it worked very well. We hung 5 S4Jrs in the grid as backlight in place of the Studio Beams.

The front 3′ of the slanted riser stage right was constructed to be removable for 2 reasons:

1. Lift access to stage

2. Easy exit/entry for groups of people (Baptism service in mind–we also stuck some rope light on a dimmer to aid those unfamiliar with the stage as they exited for that service.)

The truss was provided by Lester Hamrick of Just Right AV in Bedford, VA. We used two CM Loadstar half ton chain motors to lift the assembled truss off the stage and loaded it with 3 ETC SmartBars and 24 par 64 cans. The dimmers and fixtures were not rented or purchased. They were removed from our installed grid. Yes, it was quite a bit of work but now half our grid is clean as ever! Once everything was safetied correctly, we lifted it into placed and attached the final safety cables.

We had never tried positioning lighting fixtures in this space on our stage. The front side produced a very strong backlight on the vocals and looked nice in the haze. The backside was used for front lighting the band and down/side lighting center stage. We lit the truss with 3 different colors to produce separate feels. (Deep purple and fuchsia in addition to the blue I have shown below.)

And then there was Rosco 02, Bastard Amber. For over 5 years, we’ve stuck with cool front light. I personally like cooler color temperature but it was time for a change. We replaced it all with R02 and love it. I think I’d like to try Light Bastard Amber as well in the future.  For sidelight, we left the gel cooler resulting in very nice looking camera images.