Church Lights!: MCKBD 2016

This years MCKBD stage set took a crazy path to get to finished. We were on a tight budget to allow for some other spending outside of production. Through our various ideas we ended up going through 8 revisions of this set before we landed on one. It was nuts, and made for a great joke during the build.

Are we changing everything again?

For the set we wanted to play off of rectangular shapes. Our main element of this was a video screen we built. We built it 4' x 16' out of plywood, 2x4s, spandex, and half a million staples. It was made of 1/2" plywood with a 2x4 frame. It was WAY WAY over built. Since then, we have built some odd shaped screens out of solid Mod Scenes panels that are much lighter and easier to build.

Here is a picture of us hanging the 120 lbs monstrosity.

In addition to the screen, we made 5 rectangular blinder arrays. Each one (except the center) held 7- 4 bar blinders. We had a bunch of the blinders from a past set so they were an easy win (and cost effective win).

To support the blinders, we built sections of 20' long uni-strut sections on the ground. We latter combined these in the air to create 40' long spans. Each sections had a top and bottom unistrut bar that was joined with 4 bar blinders in the center. We evenly spread 7 blinders across these 40' sections.

We also used the same unistrut to support some of our GLP pixel tape. We zip tied it on, doing our best to make sure all the connections ended in the center for wiring ease. Hanging the tape horizontally was a pain but created a cool low res strip of content near each blinder.

In the process of building the few additional blinders we needed, we realized we could improve them a bit. We took this improved version and added it to the stuff we do with Mod Scenes to serve other churches. You can find them here. You can also find all the DYI instructions here.

We wired each of our blinders individually which gave us some really cool effects. We used Light O Rama LOR 1602s to dim them.

As we built off our rectangular design, I started wanting to make a change to the originally flat pipes that supported our Mac 101s.

We ended up creating 4 angles pipe sets that created a diamond around the center screen. It makes for an awesome element that draws your eyes in. It also gave us a bunch of great varied lighting angles with the 101s. We placed our Colorblast TRXs between the 101s for even more beams. Angles and Beams all day! The angles were a bit downstage from the blinders, which added some needed depth.

We built some tall risers that hugged the downstage edge of the stage for our band. Lastly we placed some LED tape into our drummers new acrylic kit.

As always, we did a really cool design in the lobby too to boost the energy. We blew up about 3,000 balloons and made some balloon clouds. It was cool and a pretty affordable thing.