Stage Designs

Triangle Wall

Chris Monson from Faith Chapel in Billings, MT brings us this cool projection-mapped triangle set. (originally posted June 2015)

*You could also accomplish this with ModScenes projection products.

This set consisted of a triangular grid that supported 180 build out triangle pieces. The triangles were made of translucent Coroplast strips for the edges, scored to create the shape, and a thin masonite for the front surface. The reason for the material choices was that both materials were fairly light, and he wanted to be able to back light the set and get light glowing in from the edges of the triangles, but he needed the front surface to be opaque to support projection and create the look he was going for when they weren’t projecting on it. The triangles were all built out at various heights so the the glow from back light would illuminate the front faces of the triangles to varying degrees creating a really interesting design when they weren’t projecting. They constructed this in 3 interlocking pieces of 60 triangles each and then rigged them to be supported both from the floor and from the air to minimize compression on the triangles over time.

From the beginning this set was designed to be a surface for projection mapping. They projected onto the set from the front with 3 15k lumen projectors, each handling a third of the triangles. The differences in depth among the triangles that they needed to achieve the back lit look had to be corrected on the projection end so they could create coherent images. The projection for each triangle was individual positioned to match the actual position of the triangle it was projecting on. This was done with a custom piece of software they wrote to allow them to handle all the mapping, and then also tie it into their lighting console for control during their services. Although they did make a good deal of custom video content for this set, they knew that it was unrealistic that they’d be able to produce the number of distinct video pieces they’d need to source this for every service element they would do over the 5 month period of time that they were going to use this set. They addressed this by giving control of the projection system over to the lighting console. From there, if they weren’t running video across the rig, they could treat each triangle in the rig as it’s own individual lighting fixture with the ability to set color, intensity, and texture to allow us to create looks on the fly programmed into our lighting cues. Videos played back on the system were triggered via midi show control and midi time code from lighting as well. They used a combination of Lightforge and an ETC Ion for lighting control.

Content for the screens was created almost entirely through Blender, with some compositing done through Sony Vegas, and a little bit in After Effects. In order to work with the number of surfaces they were working with and control them in a meaningful manner they wound up developing a handful of Blender addons that allowed them to manipulate the rig in ways that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

As far as cost goes, this was a fairly inexpensive set. Most of the materials for this set were reused from a previous set, and all of the gear they used is just stuff they have on hand. It was however a very labor intensive and tedious build. They had a decent crew of people working on this throughout the construction phase to get it built and up in time.

Here are a couple videos of it in action during their Christmas services:

O Come O Come Emmanuel

2014 Christmas Service

God In The Hay

And here are a few more from a Halloween event they do. For their part of this event, their team decided to create electronic remixes of songs from Frozen and perform them.

Do You Want To Build A Snowman

 

Love Is An Open Door

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Backlit

BackSide

Christmas 2014-4

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7 responses to “Triangle Wall”

  1. this is absolutely wonderful! i know just the event to use this for. can you get in contact with me so i can get some more details of the wall its self and the projection?

    Jayme McCoglan
    jayme@bocacommunity.org

  2. Steven Hall says:

    Chris,

    This is unbelievable! Simply stunning! One of these days im going to get out to South Dakota just to hang out and sponge up a bit of your awesomeness!!!

    ,Steven

  3. Chris Betchley says:

    This is simply amazing! Great job! What lighting do you have in the sanctuary? How did you pull off the lighting of the triangle edges in O Come Emmanuel?

    • Chris Monson says:

      Thanks Chris, Our normal lighting rig consists of 5 Robe ColorSpot 575’s, 4 Robe Color Wash 575’s, 10 or so Chauvet QSpots, and 15 Blizzard ToughPars, as well as a plethora of conventional lighting fixtures for primary lighting, footlights, blinders, and effects. For that Christmas service we also brought in 11 Elation Platinum Beam 5Rs, and 33 LED Bars (can’t remember the manufacturer, but they were fairly generic). As far as how we pulled off the lighting on the triangle edges? I’m going to guess you mean the triangles on the projection wall, since all the LED triangles are fairly self explanatory. Everything that happened on the triangle wall in the O Come O Come Emmanuel piece was done with projection. We create and map the video to the wall in such a way as to give the illusion of depth that isn’t actually there, and light sources that don’t really exist. It’s really quite a lot of fun to work with. If you want more information I’d be happy to provide it.

  4. Jeremy says:

    This design looks phenomenal! I’d love to do something like this. Could you send me the details on how you Mapped it for projection? jeremy@newseason.cc

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