MCKBD 2015

My Church is Kinda a Big Deal is kinda a big deal!

Every year we create an amazing atmosphere for our back to school celebration!  This year I think we hit it out of the park!

We created a lobby atmosphere based off of Games.  We made over sized, game boxes, interactive games, and a huge Jenga structure!

As you can see it was quite awesome!  We had the game boxes screen printed on coroplast (and built onto 2"x 4" boxes),  We painted monopoly pieces on our entry sidewalks with utility marking paint.  This took a full day of pressure washing to get it off (most of it at least).  We also built wooden monopoly houses and hotels!  We had a Jenga stencil CNC cut and created our own giant Jenga out of 36" x 12" x 12" boxes.  This was a blast to setup.  Sadly, I lost the 1st game.....  In my defense it is a bit harder to place the pieces from a lift 20' in the air.

Outside we also created an over sized horse shoe pit.  We used 3/4" foam (glued together and painted) to create the horse shoes and PVC for the stakes.  We cut the foam with a jig saw.  The scrap foam ended up making sweet Halo swords!

In the auditorium, though is where we really stepped it up most!  We created a low res LED wall with one of the best lighting layouts I've designed in my life.  I smile just thinking about the sweet stuff we could create with it (Yes, I am that much of a lighting geek!).

As you can imagine, this set was huge under taking and would not have been possible without everyone in our great team!

We only purchased a small amount of gear for this set, most of which was for support structure.  We recycled a lot of our material for this set from our Rock Box set.  About half of our LED tape was from the Rock Box set.

We used GLP Scenex 30m led tape driven by GLP PP4 drivers and a computer running Madrix Professional for content.

We built a 45' wide truss along our upstage edge.  All of our Unistrut (+ LED tape and movers) hung from this truss in a giant grid.  We used some Mega claws to allow us to swing down the unistrut as we flew the truss out.

We built our grid in two 10' sections.  As you can see in the above pictures we zip-tied on our LED tape to the unistrut.  There are also more detailed pictures below.

Once we had tweaked all of our spacing we added a horizontal piece of uni strut across the bottom of the 10' section to ensure our spacing stayed symmetrical.  We used 18" spacing to hang our unistruts.  We built our light weight led fixtures into our unistrut grid too.  As you can see, we used 90 deg brackets to hang our mac 101s, which made programming much easier too.

Once the top layer was wired and hung, we flew up the grid and added another 20' of unistrut to finish the "wall".  As you can see below, there is a 16' x 10' gap for our center screen to hang in.

As you can see here the LED wall is incredibly flexible and you can create a ton of visuals with it.  But, you can still also have great lighting positions.  My favorite part of this set is its flexibility.  I could easily create bright energetic looks early in the worship set and transition into a much more intimate setting without and physical changes.

As you can notice in most of the pictures, there is no center screen.  For a portion of our following series we used a lifting screen.  Sadly there was a whole in the wall, but it still looked great.

As you can probably tell this design focused mostly on back light (I know, i know all of my designs do).  We even used our Colorblast 12s for back lights too.  Their rectangular shape and tight beam gave us another interesting layer.

For years I have wanted to create a set like this that is a huge visual landscape, but allows lighting to be placed freely too.  This set was awesome!  The best part is all of this material we can re-use for future sets.

I hope you enjoyed this as much as we did building it.  If you have any questions shoot them to me at stevenhallav@gmail.com

Mod Scenes

FULL DISCALIMER!!!:  I really hesitated to post this blog post. I want to share my heart and how God has been moving in it the past few months. A big part of that is the creation of Mod Scenes. If you are reading this and it feels at all like a sales post, please just jump right past this post. My heart is to serve the kingdom of God and below is how I've been moved to do that recently.

This past year has been a bit nuts. I have kept feeling God calling me to expand my reach outside of my home church, Journeychurch.tv. I love my church and felt like God was calling me to stay though.

I pretty much chalked this up to me being a crazy person... until God gave me the inspiration for Modscenes.com

In my time over the summer I had been chatting with a great mentor of mine and trying to figure out how to share the skills God had given me with more people. From our chats and my love for lighting, I landed on a plan to create custom lights for churches. I'm glad God didn't let me stop there though, he had much better plans.

Through a crazy good opportunity to design a huge scenic set, I ran into the need for a bunch of modular scenic panels. I found that Atomic Design was really the only game in town. They make some of the most amazing products you will ever see.  That being said their panels didn't quite meet the needs of our design, so I decided to try and make some modular panels myself. Through the process of designing and later CNC cutting these panels for my client, I realized that this could change the way churches do stage scenic. I could help churches to create great environments for a fraction of the time, and with a small investment.  

 Many churches (especially larger ones) have a  person (or a few people) on staff that have taken ownership of visual design and many of them have done some great things. In the past few years since Churchstagedesignideas.com launched, people's talent and creativity has blossomed so extraordinarily. These people can create from nothing and it is so amazing and energizing to see! However, being in their shoes, I know the sacrifice it takes to pour mounds of hours into creating something, only to have to re-create it over and over again in order to refine it to a point it can be usable. My hope is that Mod Scenes can fill a gap and allow for more time margin for these visual artists. Cutting the set build time to a few minutes per panel and a few hours for a full backdrop; can allow more time to focus on lighting, interact with volunteers, or spend some well deserved time with family.

Another exciting prospect of these panels is that they can be custom cut with the CNC. Want to cover the stage in snow flakes, crosses, or that amazing texture from the Rosco frozen rain gobo? With a little setup time most anything is possible! The flexibility this creates is so awesome. Add to that using a colored piece of coroplast and printing on top of the panels and you can easily see another million possibilities

Where I think this really shines though, is in small to medium sized churches. Many small churches still lack the resources to create a beautiful stage design. Most of the time, i've found that time and workload is the most scarce resource. Mod Scenes makes it a step easy by simplifying the needs of tools, time, and labor enabling a worship pastor and a few members of the band to setup their entire stage in an hour or two. The stock panel designs are designed so that no matter the orientation they create a dynamic backdrop. This makes it easy to setup, even for someone who is not skilled in visual design. Lighting is also simple, a few up lights and they look like gold! (picture below)  (That pun was so very intended... I may have wrote this entire post to use this pun...)

In all seriousness, I am super stoked to see how this is going to help the church create environments for worship. Our generation is one that highly values visual art and this is just one more avenue to engage people so that the local church can share the gospel. I cant wait to use them and see them used for God's glory!