Stage Designs

Throwback: Radiate and Glow

Gary Brownell from Sagebrush Community Church in Albuquerque, NM brings us this cool screen and glowing Marshall stacks. (Originally posted August 2012)

Gary wanted to create some artificial Marshall stacks but use them as crowd blinders too.

Marshall Stack Blinders

So he created some rectangle colored screens out of 2×4’s painted flat black and covered with metal window screen ($15 each at Home Depot). He stretched the screen around the frames and stapled it. Then he front-lit if with LED light strips.

The larger lights behind the transparent screens were 12″ round work lights ($11 at Home Depot) with 60 watt Satco silver crown bulbs ($2.84 at 1000bulbs.com). The work lights were tie-wrapped in place within a stand-alone chrome painted 1 1/2″ PVC frame.

The four smaller horizontal lights were bathroom vanity lights ($13 at Home Depot) with 60 watt Par 30 halogen lights and were mounted to the PVC frame.

The lights were wired to small portable dimmer packs which were controlled by DMX at the lighting console.

The lights under the risers were made to look like speaker cabinets. The same techniques described above were used to create a similar look. The window screen was the grill cloth, the speakers were 12″ work lights. The screens on the speakers were lit with RGB LED tape (16 ft for $89 at cheapled.com). The church name “Sagebrush” was in Marshall font centered in the cabinet and was back lit with LED tape.

The Screen

To break up the blockiness of the stage design he went for this screen look.

The video screen was constructed of 1 1/2″ 8′ x4′ sheets of overlapping double layered styrofoam ($20 at Home Depot) and glued together with liquid nails. The screens were edged in 3″ black gaffers tape.

The curved areas used 3/4″ styrofoam ($15 8′ x4′ sheet Home Depot) to create a hollow 8″ curve. Inside the curve was RGB LED tape ($89 16 feet wholesale-led.com). He used two 16 ft rolls for the four curves. The LED tape was connected to a DMX controller ($39 at superbrightled.com) and controlled by the light console. The front side of the curved area was covered in diffusion lighting gel.

The screen was constructed in three sections then hung and connected together.

The video projection was matted out to conform to the screen shape.

Throwback: Wall-less Simplicity in Lights

30 responses to “Throwback: Radiate and Glow”

  1. Steven Hall says:

    Gary,

    I love the design of the screen and surround. It looks amazing. Keep up the great work for the kingdom of God!

    ,Steven

  2. Jeremy says:

    Wow, this is definitely one of my top 10 stage designs on this site! So awesome! It sounds like you got some great deals, what was your overall cost?

  3. Ryan Spencer says:

    Dude… so awesome! I echo that this I one of my favorite designs I have seen. Those silver crown bulbs are nice touch!

    • Ryan Spencer says:

      Question for Gary – Are you satisfied with the 60W silver crowns bulbs or would you go for the 100W if you had to make you order again?

      • The 60 watt bulbs work fine for us. Believe it or not, with that many bulbs the look is brighter than what you would think it would be. People complained they were too bright and our light person has had to lower the intensity on the saturated look. The 100 watt bulbs aren’t that much more expensive but you have to do the numbers to make sure you are within the capacity of your dimmers. I would recommend you use the 130 volt bulbs because they will last longer than the 120 volt bulbs. We haven’t had to replace a bulb in 9 months and the bulbs see nine services and four rehearsals a week.

        • Ryan Spencer says:

          Thanks for the info Gary. I guess when you have that many lights that would get crazy bright. I’m doing a stage change this week and was going for a column look similar to that (but not that many lights) and those bulbs were that extra something I was looking for. Thanks again for sharing the details.

  4. Liz Withers says:

    Do the lights in the marshall stacks put off a lot of heat? That’s my only concern. Other than that, this is a great set. It looks like something you’d see at a Coldplay concert.

    • Thanks for the comment about Coldplay. They have been using a lot of colorful florescent paint recently. On the subject of heat, the bulbs will put out heat like any other incandescent bulb. We rarely run the lights at full power and only briefly, to get the bright white look. To get the soft amber look the lights are only about 15 to 20 percent on.

      • MYRNA GARRASTEGUI says:

        What was used to skin the front and back of the 8″ hollow curves?

        • Some of the details were probably edited out for brevity. The back of the screen was painted with a roller using flat black acrylic paint. The 3″ inch gaffers tape that holds everything together, is flat black also. Because the styrofoam sheets are covered in a thin layer of shiny clear plastic, it caused the projection side to glare. To stop the glare, we rolled on bright white acrylic paint with an egg shell finish. The result worked great for us.

          If you need a brighter result, maybe because your projector isn’t bright enough, you can paint on Screen Goo (Rosebrand.com), but is pretty pricey.

        • The front of the curves is diffusion lighting gel. The LED tape lights the gel from inside the curves.

          wholesale-leds.com is the correct website. http://www.wholesale-leds.com/lightsledrgbsuperbrightremotecontrolledleddisplaylight16feetreel-1.aspx is the page where the LED tape I used is found. 5050SMD RGB color changing LED’s. Get the strips with 300 LED’s with remote and power supply. They are twice as bright as the strips with just 150 LED’s.

  5. Michael Montoya says:

    I love sagebrush and have since I first stepped on the campus…. My kids like church even more and almost everyday they ask daddy is it Sunday yet!!!!! i love the way sagebrush gets my fathers message to me and my family and worship is awesome!!! my kids even sign the worship songs when we are leaving……….

  6. Jared Mathis says:

    What was used to skin the front and back of the 8″ hollow curves?

    • Some of the details were probably edited out for brevity. The back of the screen was painted with a roller using flat black acrylic paint. The 3″ inch gaffers tape that holds everything together, is flat black also. Because the styrofoam sheets are covered in a thin layer of shiny clear plastic, it caused the projection side to glare. To stop the glare, we rolled on bright white acrylic paint with an egg shell finish. The result worked great for us.

      If you need a brighter result, maybe because your projector isn’t bright enough, you can paint on Screen Goo (Rosebrand.com), but is pretty pricey.

  7. Chad Harper says:

    I concur – my favorite stage design to date. Can you expound on “matting” out the projectors? How is that done and how many projectors did you use? Also, a little more detail on the assembly of the hollow curves and the screen would be appreciated.

  8. Ellis L. Abram says:

    This is one fo the hottest stages I have seen in a long time. Not overly complex but with great little details that add to the whole looke. My fav part is that screen with the words. I want to know how you accomplished that. There are so many possibilities with that.

    • The image is front projected onto painted styrofoam. The image comes from the same single projector that is mainly used to project on a large video screen that is behind the Pastor when he speaks. His screen is about 24 feet wide and comes down in front of the band risers when the band is done but is behind the Pastor.

      So essentially we are making use of a projector that is existing, but projecting on different screens when the band plays. We have used different shaped screens over time to give the band stage area a different look. The different shaped screens required different matting. One tip: Construct the screens so you have 2-3 inch black edges so you have a some room between the projected surface and where you don’t want the projection.

      This website is going to do an article on the specifics of how to create a matte so the projector doesn’t project beyond the screen’s edges.

      Thanks for the questions. I’m glad someone is checking out the stage design website. You can also see 10 weeks of different looks of the stage at sagebrush.cc/watch/current series.

  9. Gary,
    I am currently running the same combination of LED strips and DMX Decoder that you are. I have it connected to our ETC ION board and we are having difficulty controlling the color changes and dimmer on the LED tape. I was wondering if you experienced any of these difficulties, and if so how did you solve it. We patched the LED tape into our board using Generic LED RGB 16bit. We have some control but the colors are all out of sync with what they are supposed to be, and when we dim to black the tape changes colors like crazy before going to black. Do you know how you patched it into your board?
    Thanks for your help,
    Dan

    • If I remember correctly, The colors on the LED tape do not match the colors that the lighting console was programmed for.

      We connected the black wire to the voltage terminal and turned on a specific color at the lighting console. We then tried the different wires on the LED tape until the correct color showed up on the LEDs.

      What we ended up with was this. The black wire of the LED tape was connected to the voltage terminal, Green to #1, Red to #2 and Blue to #3. When we made these changes the correct colors responded and we could mix the colors to achieve any color we wanted. It also took care of the flashing problem.

  10. Jonathan Campana says:

    Hello,
    I’m working on re-doing the stage in our youth room, and I love the concept of the lights that you used. I have a question for you-Due to limited dimmer racks, and the proximity of the stage to the youth, I’d like to save some power, and have the lights be a little dimmer. I’m planning on doing a horizontal strip of them across the stage in between the space that the drummer will be and the projector screen. Could I use the globe shaped 40w bulbs with a medium base in these fixtures? I don’t want to order them only to then get them back. Thanks!

    • You could buy just a few bulbs to experiment with to see if you are getting the results you are looking for before you commit to buy for the whole project. The bulbs we ended up using were not our first choice but were a result of some experimentation. For instance, we experimented with flood versus spot bulbs in the quad horizontal lights. We ended up using the spots for the narrower beams. I also didn’t think 60 watt bulbs would be very bright but I was glad we didn’t go brighter because we rarely blast them at full power.

  11. Josh Curry says:

    Gary, the diffusion lighting gel, did you guys buy a full sheet of lighting gel and trim it down? It doesn’t look like you guys used a pack of single gels on the edge because the edge looks seamless. Also about how heavy are your screens?

    Thank you for your time- Josh

    • You are correct. I bought a short roll of it. Even though it is all one piece, there was not much waste. I cut the smaller curves out of the leftover sections since the curve was the same.

      • If you want a more rigid material, you can replace the diffusion gel with Coroplast but the results will not be as bright.

      • Phil Rainbow says:

        Hey Gary,
        Can you tell me what kind of lighting gel you guys used and where you got it from? There are so many different types out there, I don’t know where to start! Thanks for your help – you guys did and incredible job!

        • Phil,

          The curves were cut from a roll of Lee 216 white diffusion filter material (bhphotovideo.com, $119.00/25 ft.). I used the same material on my last project that was featured on this site a few days ago, called “Tightly Gridded”.

          • Tyler Myers says:

            Thanks! We’re about to copy this as well. Thanks Phil for asking about the Gel. I was wondering the same thing and had somehow missed your post the first time through!

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