Stage Designs

Industrial Light Sabers

Mark Djerf from Emmanuel Christian Center in Spring Lake Park, MN brings us these light saber set pieces for their stage.

The light sabers were designed using LED tape inside of 3-6 ft square acrylic tubing pieces. To achieve a cloudy, even appearance, they used white plasti-dip as a coating. Although less than ideal when off (against a black backdrop), they found that white worked best to achieve the effect. The bases were made out of steel piping on top of a wood circle, which gave them the weight they needed. They then used the hook side of velcro to make sure they stayed secured to the floor.

The LED tape uses 12V power, which they provided using a 24 channel DMX splitter that recieves a three pin DMX cable and outputs 8 sets of a red, green, blue, and 12V signal. They ran network cable from the DMX splitter box to each of the lights. Since there were network ports in the stage floor boxes, they were able to patch most of the cables backstage. The result was that each individual light saber was fully DMX controllable.

The “speaker” light boxes on the floor were made with simple repurposed 1×1 frames, ¼” plywood –cut holes with a jigsaw- , and $7 industrial reflective light fixtures from Home Depot. Using 40w Marconi bulbs (1000bulbs.com), they were amazed at how the fixtures grabbed the light, even when they were dimmed. This allowed them to have subtle backlight without blinding the congregation. They chose to use Leviton D4DMX-MD5 dimmer boxes for the speaker lights, so each bulb could be controlled separately.

For lighting, they used a dozen Mac101’s on the floor and ceiling, a pair of Studio 575 Intels, and LED bars in the ceiling for color washes.

backlight

dimmer boxes

DMX 24 ch splitter

inside box

LED tape

lightsaber base

lightsabers

Quarter inch plywood

reflective

speaker light box

spots

square acryllic tubing

Sun AM

with lighting 1

with lighting 2

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4 responses to “Industrial Light Sabers”

  1. matthew allen says:

    Awesome design
    I’m having a hard time finding the tubes for the sabers though.
    If you could tell us where you got them at that would be great.

  2. John says:

    I would like to implement your led light saber design.
    But I need a little more information.

    Where did you get the 24 channel DMX512 splitter?
    What model are you using?
    Who makes the splitter you are using?
    Where did you buy the LED strips?
    Do all led strips use DMX512 control?

    Thanks for sharing the great design idea.

  3. Jeremie Bird says:

    Great design! Can you provide me a link on where you purchased the LED Tape and connections from? Also can you explain to me how you wired everything together with a decoder?
    Thanks

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