Production Musings

Hanging the 4x16s

// December 18th, 2009 // 4 Comments » // Thoughts

I’ve gotten a few questions on how the 4×16 panels were actually hung so I took a quick photo of what we did. All of the materials I mentioned in the previous post can be found at Home Depot. The metal ends you see pictured is metal ribbon used for bailing cardboard or other materials and I believe it comes in rolls. Sawyer Scott designed these panels and ran the wire the length of their edges. We drilled holes in each end and used hanging wire at the tops and bottoms.  We hung from the truss and anchored to eye bolts in the stage floor.  Each panel had 4 rigging points.  As you can see, it doesn’t have to be precise or super neat.

“Inside Outside Upside Down” Series

// October 27th, 2009 // 8 Comments » // Stage Design

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…

One of Those People

// October 14th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Video

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!

Irrational Series Stage Design

// September 16th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Stage Design

Ok, back to stage designs.  I’m not going to lie, this design wasn’t a big hit.  It definitely wasn’t a big hit for the poor couple that chose to get married on the stage with giant question marks in the background.  (But hey, I like to think that we helped strengthen their marriage – what better day to really question everything.  Right?) On a serious note, to that couple and all who get married at Blue Ridge, we do apologize that we are unable to change the stage to be more wedding friendly and elegant. There are just not enough hours in a Saturday!

The week of stage change, the whole team was in Chicago for Willow Creek’s Art Conference.  There wasn’t much we could do but we gave it our best shot.  Two of the stage design volunteers, Sawyer and Sue Scott, took it upon themselves to make several giant question marks matching the series graphic above.  Styrofoam insulation is the stuff.  It’s cheap.  It’s light.  It’s easy to work with.  After some tracing and many many hours of cutting 3 different sized question marks they were done.  Prior to leaving for Chicago, I changed a few colors and aimed the Color Splits where the question marks would appear.  When we returned to Lynchburg on Saturday, Todd and I spent several hours getting them hung, stood back, and said, “It is good.”  It was our best.  This was our last design with the giant riser built on stage.  I’d say it was split 50/50 of those where were sad/happy to see it go.

In the upcoming designs, we’ll be using Google Sketchup more.  I’m excited about the potential for designing virtually.