Wrinkles and Ruffles

The North Point Ministries team from North Point Community Church brings us this use of depth and texture.

The arches of this set were designed in such a way as to eliminate the proscenium encasement that the architecture of their stage creates. By building the arches over the sidewalls, it created the illusion of a less divided stage. The staggering of depth between the outside arches and the center arches created the illusion of a much deeper space. The texture in the background filled in the space between the arches. This texture in addition to the texture on the arches created a look that appears complex with very few individual pieces.

They started off dead hanging 10′ sticks of truss from the ceiling on either side of the stage, pitching up from left to right. To the side of each stick of truss, they affixed 10′ sections of pipe using cheeseboroughs to create an arc if looked at from above. They further created the arc by attaching another section of pipe 4′ long between the center of the 10′ pipe and the truss. This extra pipe softened the curve and reinforced the structure. Sandbags were hung off the backside of the truss to counterbalance the weight of the pipe. From this structure, they hung the background beige camouflage. They created the texture in the camo by pulling sections up behind itself and using small white zip ties to affix the section to itself. They extended this design piece across the entire stage by stapling the camo to the existing walls under the screens as well as their new stage screen doors. They used the zip tie method to create the texture here as well.

The arches were four layers of 3/4″ plywood cut to shape on a CNC router and then glued together into strips with over lapping sections to attach to one another. These strips were put together using screws from the back as to not blemish the front with screw holes. The four openings of the arches were backed with Coroplast sheets cut to shape with a razor blade. The Coroplast created a solid structure to which they hot glued sheets of crumpled paper. The crumpled paper was created by taking 4′ wide by 1000′ long rolls of butcher paper and cutting sections off the roll and then wadding them up until they had the desired texture.

Both the camo and the paper were lit from above via an assortment of Chauvet Colorado and Batten LEDs. The majority of their moving lights were hung off of two sections of truss. One section at 20′ and the other at 30′ to create an asymmetrical look above the stage. They did hang a few spots lower behind their proscenium via ladder pipe rigs. Their color washes were hung off their downstage grid flanking the stage in order to cast side light across the stage.