Stage Designs

LED Bands

The North Point Ministries team from North Point Community Church brings us these fake LED bands. (Originally posted September 2014)

The whole set was designed as a giant “V” pattern reaching out toward the audience. This slight angle was designed to give the stage depth. Part of a rock-n-roll look is that the lights are low and become a part of the background. The background vertical strips as well as the plasmas were added as a way of creating color and movement across the lower part of the stage where they couldn’t project video without hitting the people on the stage.

First, they laid out their pick points on the steel supporting the roof in a way as to get the desired “V” patterns. They dead hung the four sticks of 20’ truss as well as two additional 10’ sticks with a combination of span sets, steel rigging cable, and deck chain. The deck chain was used in order to give them the flexibility needed to get the truss level and at the desired height. Then they hung and rigged all the moving fixtures off of the four 20’ sticks of truss. The 10’ sticks were used to rig the eight 50” Panasonic pro-performance plasmas that were the primary background for their speaker setting look.

In order to create the projected “LED bands,” they took 2×4’s cut down to 20 inches and zip tied them to the top of both bars of the truss pointing out toward the audience. They screwed vertical pieces of 2×4’s between the top and bottom sticks of horizontal 2×4’s. From there, they took 1×2 strips and screwed them onto the vertical 2×4’s. These 1×2’s basically gave them a frame for the LED bands that set about 6 inches off the front side of the truss. They used pieces of Coroplast sheets cut down to 30” x 8’ and 46” x 8’ segments, which were hot glued to the wooden structure. Then they covered the seams of the Coroplast with 2” gray gaff tape. The whole surface was painted white to cover up the lines as well as cut down the transparence of the Coroplast. They had a Barco HD30 (30,000 Lumen) projector that they used to project their speaker onto the center screen whenever he was being broadcast from one of the other campuses. They used this HD30 to project the graphics onto their “LED Bands.” They used software called ArKaos run from a separate computer but triggered from their Jands Vista Lighting consoles for all their graphic content.

The background panels were two separate sheets of Coroplast. The front layer was a sheet of black that was cut out on a CNC router. This was done off site and delivered to them. Then they took a second sheet of white and hot glued it to the back of the black sheet. They ran aircraft cable down the flutes on both sides of each finished sheet and hung them from the truss that held up their back, black curtain. They lit the center panels from behind with Chauvet Batten strips and for the side panels under the screens they used Chauvet Colorados.

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Glittery Swag Drips and Drops

One response to “LED Bands”

  1. Mark Humphrey says:

    How wide are the “LED Bands?”

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