Twice a year we have a Woman's event at the church. It is a cool time for ladies from 13-113 to have a great time, be in fellowship, worship, and learn. This past September we had the event featuring Nicole Crank as the guest speaker.
The theme of the event was from the 1950's. We tried to capture the feel of a 1950's sock hop. The lobby featured chandeliers of vinyl records, root beer floats bar, ice cream bars, random games that were invented in the 50's, and a 50's era corvette out front.
The women's ministry team did an awesome job putting all of the lobby stuff together.
The production team took care of replicating that feel onstage. Our jumping off points were the Lawerence Welk show and the artwork that Colin created for the event (see below).
We wanted to build some instrument shields similar to the ones used in the Lawerence Welk Show. We also had a desire to tie the set into the artwork that we had every where. I really love the polygons behind the Girlfriends logo. So we made a plan to have some flats that were polygons similar to the art work. We also made our Instrument shields with a similar abstract angle. Below is the layout we landed on.
As you will probably notice, there is a car onstage in the drawing. We had arranged for a '54 Chevy Bel Air to be onstage, however the owner had to cancel about a week out due to an incident with the car.
We made some last minute adjustments and I think we still hit on a really good end product.
We ended up using 9 sheets of 4' x 8' x 1/2" plywood for the set pieces. Four of the sheets were used to make the instrument shields. Here is what I came up with for the size.
We cut the remaining plywood at varying angles. Although, I would love to claim that I had an intricate plan of how all the tall pieces would be cut, however that is not the case. I pretty much grabbed a saw and started cutting.
As you can see, there was also a bunch of painting.
Our original plan was to cut strips of coroplast to edge the front of our panels. After making strips and affixing them to one of the panels, I found it took way too much time and didn't look very polished.. So, we decided to use gaff tape as our black stripes. I measured a 4" border on the panels, and put the tape on in a 4" inset. A bit of cutting with a razor knife and we ended up with a pretty stellar looking piece from offstage.
We made a few kickstands out of 2x4s to hold up our large panels. We found that the instrument shields were too heave to stand on their own, so we used our handy dandy cinder blocks to keep them weighted down. To finish out the instrument shields we had some thick vinyl letters cut that say GF.
To top it off a bit, Kendall wired up an awesome Super 55 Mic for Trent.
And Finally, here is the finished product.
As you can see below, during the first song we used black and white Imag, and visuals from the 50's. The first song was a medley of 50's songs. It was awesome.
Our
budget was $500 for all the materials. Our largest cost was the plywood.
