Stage Designs

Throwback: Victory in Curtains

Jon Ackerman from The MET Church in Houston, TX brings us this large Victory logo in the midst of curtains. (Originally posted Jun 2013)

They sent a design to their friends at Display Ideas in Spring, TX. The company cut the letters out on their wood CNC router in two sizes: 6’ tall and 4’. The larger letters would be hung at the TheMET’s Jones Rd. campus and the smaller letters would be floor mounted at their 2nd campus on Fry Rd. They wanted continuity between their campuses.

It took 6 volunteers around 20 hours to paint, drill, screw, staple, fit and wire all 14 letters required to spell out “ V I C T O R Y” twice.

Here is the list of materials they used:
15x sheets of 4’x8’x 1/2” MDF
150x Leviton 167 Medium Base, Two piece, keyless incandescent lamp holder
25x 6”x10’ Rolls of steel flashing
1x 250’ roll of SPT-2 Lamp wire
150x Sylvania 25w Medium base clear vanity light
1x gallon of Valspar primer/paint in matte light steel gray
6x dimmer channels
2x 1 3/8” Forstn bits to drill holes
1x Hitachi Crown air stapler
14x Edison male plugs
7x Edison female plugs
Loads of hot glue
10x Solenoid Kabuki drops from Sew What, Inc.
10x Pizzas, 50 bottles of water and enough sugary drinks to energize a small army of middle schoolers

Visit www.themetcollective.org/victoryset/ to view the full post on how they constructed this set.

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Drop the Lighting Grid LED Logo Lines

7 responses to “Throwback: Victory in Curtains”

  1. Really cool idea guys! It reminds me of what I saw at Catalyst this year.

  2. Mitch says:

    How are front faces lit here? Really like how you can see each band member/singer, but they aren’t washed out with white light, and neither is the rest of the stage.

  3. Tim says:

    What did you cover the front of the letters with, or did you cover them at all? Do you have any pics of front side with lights off?

  4. Scott Ivey says:

    looking good boys…

  5. Jon Ackerman says:

    Hey all,

    We didn’t light the faces with anything other than the 25w clear glass light bulbs on the inside. We painted the MDF a light grey paint so that it wasn’t so bright and stark of contrast. We didn’t cover the letters at all. Each letter is lined with 6″ wide galvanized steel flashing so that it creates a shadow box around each individual letter. The light then doesn’t spill to any other letters and provides the punch that we wanted for the letters to stand out.

    As for our band and vocals, we use a combination of uplighting and top/front lighting. We use Showtech active DMX sunstrips for our uplighting. They are an effect light and do a ton of other things, but they provide us with a great dimmable uplight fixture. We then top/front light with two 750w lekos. The key we have found is to use a light meter to get each face to be lit evenly. Our aim is to get to F4.0 on the light meter, which makes our band and vocals really pop off the background. The other thing we do is lower the intensity or brightness of the backdrop to around 65%. This helps them to really pop off the background!

    Let me know if you have any other questions. You can send me an email for any more questions or pictures: techarts@themetonline(dot)org!

  6. Paul Maynard says:

    I know this is an old post, but I’ve done several sets like this and I now have several hundred sockets left over just like the ones used in this set that have never been used. If anyone is ever interested in purchasing some, I would love to get rid of these (and for a great price!!). Just let me know. paul.maynard@trbc.org Thanks!

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