Stage Designs

Inside Outside Projection

Chris Monson from Faith Chapel in Billings, MT brings us this awesome mix of projection and pixels in a 3d space.

From Chris: Our set for the summer of 2018 was initially supposed to be a bit of a stripped back design over the summer since we needed to share portions of our lighting and pixel rigs with our summer camp. In the end the general structure of the set worked out really well and we wound up just augmenting the rig with additional fixtures as the year went on.

This set consisted of a number of elements. I’ll break it down into the following sections.

Structure
Prior to designing this set we had picked up several five way truss joints thinking that they may come in handy at some point. After playing around with a couple of designs involving them I came up with this structure. Basically it consists of three 20′ tall truss towers on base plates connecting to several X shaped truss structures that were rigged from above hanging out over the band. Once we had this basic structure in place we added two additional 20′ vertical pipe sections on base plates and then connected horizontal pipe between the vertical trusses and pipes to provide hang points for screens, panels, and some lightweight LED fixtures.

Lighting
The lighting rig on this set consisted of 10 Chauvet Maverick Mk1 Spots, 6 Elation Fuze Washes, 16 Chauvet Intimidator Wash 350 IRCs, 16 Chauvet Colorband Pix LED bars, 14 Blizzard ToughPar RGBAWs, and a plethora of conventional fixtures.

Pixels
Our pixel rig for this set consisted of 8 of our custom built LED panels. These panels are constructed of 6″ spaced WS2811 Holiday Coro Bullet style LED strings connected to Holiday Coro Alphapix 16 controllers. The pixels were poked through pre-drilled holes in black Coroplast to create 6.5’x9′ panels mounted in welded metal frames. More information on the construction of these panels is available at https://churchstagedesignideas.com/folded-inward/

In addition to the LED panels, we lined all of our truss with a higher density generic APA102 pixel tape which was connected to PixelPusher controllers. Note, we no longer recommend these controllers. The Holiday Coro gear is much nicer to work with, but as we already own this gear it’s what we are using.

All of our pixels are controlled using a custom piece of pixel mapping software that we have released to the community. It allows for procedural control of complex pixel rigs by connecting to an external lighting console and providing easy and flexible control points that let you get an unlimited number of looks very easily. We have found this to be a really fantastic way to control pixel rigs and so we have made the software free for anyone wanting to do the same sorts of things that we are doing. You can download the software at https://resources.faithchapel.cc/blogs/pixel_mapping_software

Projection
Due to lack of good options for placing projectors, and lack of proper lens options for this set, we had to get really creative. We wound up converging and projection mapping 4 15k lumen projectors from a similar location each covering 3 of the panels. Projectors A and B covered panels 1, 2, and 3. Projectors C and D covered panels 2, 3, and 4. This was a little unorthodox, but actually wound up working out ok. The brightness was adequate, the resolution was sub-par, but at 20′ away it was acceptable for the style of content we were putting on it.

Overall this set turned out really nice, especially given that it was only supposed to be a stop-gap set to get us through the summer. We actually liked it so much that we kept it around for an additional 3 months longer than initially planned.

Additional Resources:

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Throwback: Slab Wood Clustered Balloons

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