Stage Designs

Throwback: A Spread of Cups

Barrett Hillenburg from High Street Baptist Church in Springfield, MO brings us this grid of dots created from bowls! (Originally posted August 2013)

They started by building a wall to cut their stage in half since it’s so big.

They took five 10′ sticks of rohn tower (triangle truss) and connected them end to end. Then they built a large, bulky tower that mounted on to the existing structure of their stage to hold the ends of the tower up. They also placed a support in the middle of the tower to help hold up the sag in the middle.

They took 4′ x 6′ sheets of cardboard donated to them by a local company and painted both sides flat black. From there, they glued styrofoam bowls on to the sheets of cardboard using Elmer’s glue. To ensure that the bowls were evenly spaced, they built a guide out of plywood. After allowing the bowls to dry overnight, they stood the sheets of cardboard up on end, zip tied them to the truss in three places and gaff taped the seams – this creating a singular “wall” of the bowls.

They left one section un-tied and un-taped so that we could use that as back stage storage. They fashioned the wall to hang on two slits of plywood and the wall lifts and moves out of the way, creating a large door to move the elements from their classic service (grand piano, orchestra, music stands, etc) out of the way to clean up the stage for our contemporary service.

They also built two stand-alone sections to place below their projector screens to tie the edges of the stage in with the back.

They lit the wall with American DJ 22-inch LED bars that were attached to the bottom of the truss pointing down. They also used two ColorKey LED par 56s to light the sides of the wall. They took 5 Elation E-Par Tris to back light the band. To light the stand-alone sections, they used 4 (two per section) Elation E-Par Tris. They used 4 E-Par Tris to light the band from our catwalk. Finally, they used 12 “chicken lights” from Lowe’s to add some additional back lighting and to add some “life” to the truss.

In all, they spent about $300 on the design.

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5 responses to “Throwback: A Spread of Cups”

  1. I always love seeing lights behind a band. It looks great on camera too!

  2. WHOSOEVERS says:

    Are these 4×8 Panels? How many cups are on each panel?

  3. Whosoevers,

    The panels are 6’x8′ and have 80 cups each.

  4. sebastian valencia says:

    hi, how do u light the cups?

    • Hey Sebastian,

      Sorry that its taken me this long to reply. I just saw this.

      We lit the cups from above. We had several American DJ LED bars that we hung from the bottom of the truss to light the cups. We also used two ColorKey LED Par Cans from the side to provide some fill light.

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