Stage Designs

Lattice Burst

Josiah Harmon from New Life Church in Everett, WA brings us this lattice sunburst for their stage.

At New Life, they tend to approach stage designs from a seasonal perspective. Instead of designing for a specific series, they try to find some sort of backdrop that creates a warm, inviting atmosphere for people when they enter the room. For that reason, they tend to change designs 2-4 times a year, and they are constantly evolving. For example, the two square 4’x4′ lattices you see on the sides of the stage were added for Easter, as well as the orange cyc lights on the ceiling.

This spring they decided to get some garden lattices, and see what they could come up with. Here’s how they did it!

Materials:

  • Four 4×8 Traditional Cedar Lattices
  • Four 4×8 Cedar Square Lattices
  • 20-30 1×2 lumber
  • Titebond I wood glue
  • 9/16″ staples
  • Staple gun
  • Pliers
  • Pencil
  • 300′ spool of waxed cotton stage tie (preferably solid core)
  • 1 box of eye hooks
  • Several colors of wood stain paintbrushes
  • 1 Box of 1″ wood screws
  • Sawsall

You can get all of these materials at your local Lowes or Home Depot, except the stage tie. You’ll have to get that from a theater supply company like PNTA.

They ended up with a few more lattices than they needed, so you’ll have to modify the design based upon the size of your stage. The 1×2 is for mounting the eyehooks to the lattices, and for the boards that fan out across the front of the lattices. All of this ended up costing between $300 and $400 to do.

After they purchased the supplies, they laid the lattices out on the stage to figure out what sort of shape they wanted to go with. They wanted to make it look kind of like a sunset or sunrise, so they settled on an arc shape. Next they got out the saws-all and started cutting up the lattices. It took them about an hour of trial and error to settle on the final design. Finally, they added the 1×2 on top to really accentuate the arc of the whole design.

The next day Josiah came in and glued and stapled the lattices together. He used glue and staples in place of screws and nails because of how fragile cedar lattice is. If you try to drive a screw through it, you will most likely split it out. And if you only use staples, the whole thing may fall apart when you’re moving it around.

They let the glue dry for 24 hours, then hung them with stage tie.

They had some leftover stain laying around, and they thought it would look cool if they added some different colors for the 1x2s.

To light the whole thing, they used a small black truss to mount the yellow par lights in front, and free standing pars in the back with some orange gels on them. They put the lights in the back to add some three dimensionality to the design. LED’s would work great for this too. The Edison bulbs you see on the side were left over from their fall/winter stage design, but they decided to keep them because they worked well with this design too. We found the electrical cords at IKEA, and the Edison bulbs at an online retailer. For Easter, they also added a couple cyc lights with orange gels to the sides of the center speaker cluster in the house.

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Art Decor Parable Pages

7 responses to “Lattice Burst”

  1. Nate says:

    This looks great! Thanks for sharing!

  2. Sarah says:

    New Life has a wonderful Creative Arts team! The creativity that is shared with the rest of the church is the cherry on top of what is already a wonderful church! While working with them I never feel like it’s about creating a show. They strive to create a capturing environment that helps create visuals,emotions,feelings and a comfort that people might not feel otherwise! And s/o to Josiah for being such a hard worker and for taking something as simple as lattice to create a beautiful image every Sunday! Way to be the church!

    • Josiah says:

      Thanks Sarah! I have to emphasize that this was really a group effort. It took all 6 of us to get this thing put together and set in such a short amount of time. Tony, our video director, did the most work on this. I just happened to be the guy to post it!

    • Sean G. says:

      That’s awesome Sarah! Thanks for the kind words! Thanks Josiah for posting on behalf of the CA team!

  3. A++ This is really amazing! Thanks for the share!

  4. Looks great you guys! Looking for some ideas for us at GC and stumbled upon this!

  5. Derek Price says:

    This design looks awesome!
    Question who built and designed the stage platform ?

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