Jordan Christie and Luke Seager from Hillcrest Spanish Trail in Pensacola, FL brings us this great use of styrofoam balls.
From the team: For this design we knew that we wanted to do something from floor to ceiling and we wanted it to be centered on the cross. At first we thought that we would try something using stage blinders but quickly realized that it wasn’t going to be budget friendly. However, in designing the set with blinders we realized that we wanted to see many points of light on stage. That led us to the using white styrofoam half ball idea that we had seen here…
Construction of the styrofoam ball panels was easy but tedious. We bought insulation foam boards from Lowes and painted them black. We bought 1280 styrofoam half balls from smoothfoam.com. Then we simply created a grid on the foam board and hot glued all the balls to the 4x14ft panels.
We made the LED light tubes using plastic fluorescent light guards. Then we stuck LED tape inside of them and diffused the light with some thin fabric we had on hand. To control the LED tubes lights we reused the controller we made for our LED chevron design…
Lastly we hung each of the six panels from our light truss about 1ft apart. Each panel is down lit with a Chauvet COLORado batten 72. We hung one 8ft LED tube in-between each panel and then hung 6 more 4ft LED tubes out from the back wall, increasing their height to frame out the cross that hangs right in the center.
This set was relatively budget friendly and is easily repeatable and scaleable. The ball panels and LED tubes can all be reused and incorporated into future design projects also.
12 Insulation Sheets = $177
3″ Styrofoam half balls (3 cases of 415 balls) $529
8ft light protectors x 5 = $25
4ft light protectors x 6 = $21
Grand total = $752
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