Stage Designs

Throwback: Rippling Background

Steven Hall from Journeychurch.tv in Norman, OK brings us this cool folded set. (Originally posted August 2014)

Every year at Christmas, they try to create amazing atmospheres that help people worship and have a blast. Their congregation and guests were welcomed this year with one of the largest Christmas light displays in Oklahoma, an amazing lobby atmosphere, and great hospitality. This great atmosphere was continued in their Auditorium with their Faux-austrian drape set.

Their set started with 9 vertical pipes that were used to hang their Faux-austrians and Mac 101s. They made the faux-austrians with rolls of Silver Allegro Silk fabric from RoseBrand. Once stretched out, they made folds with the fabric. After a ton of trial and error, they found that if they folded their fabric back on itself 1′, it would make great folds that weren’t too deep but still had some body. They made these 1′ folds every 4′ to get the most even spacing possible. They used Rose Brand Hold-on clips to fasten the fabric together at their folds. This clip also acted as their attachment point to the vertical rigging pipes. Once they had all of our folds made, they attached the top of the curtain to their lighting grid with more hold-ons. It took a bit of adjusting up and down with each fold to get the correct look. They had 4 sections of drape upstage and 2 sections downstage that acted as wings.

Once the curtains were hung, they used 6 Martin Stagebars to light them. They laid out their Mac 101s in a 7 x 3 grid with a few extras on the floor. The large amount of fixtures with a narrow beam made for great effects, beams, and back lights. They also hung a row of Colorblasts above the curtains to provide some backlight and beams.

For some set changes, they build a few carts. Three had Christmas trees on them, and two had  individually controllable blinders. Their tree carts each had 4 Christmasy looking trees that were made of 1/2″ expanded plastic. Boss Printing cut the trees on their CNC machine and they attached them to 2×4 frames with wood glue. The two blinder carts were covered in individually controlled blinder lamps that looked like an EQ. They used 2x4s for framing and controlled the blinders with their Christmas light dimmers.

More specific details at churchlights.blogspot.com

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2 responses to “Throwback: Rippling Background”

  1. Joe Johnson says:

    Hi I am the LD for Jubilee Fellowship Church in the Denver Metro area of Colorado. We are considering doing something like this for our Christmas eve service in a conference center and I was hoping you could answer a few questions for me. What type of fabric did you use? Was it one large sheet or individual strips? If everything is planned out in advance how many hours would it take to set up the pipe with the drapes on it? Any information is helpful and much appreciated!

  2. Jesse Coonen says:

    What was the distance between each vertical pipe?

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