Stage Designs

LED Wave Pattern

James Tucker from Christ’s Church in Jacksonville, FL brings us these fun diffusion towers. (originally posted September 2015)

They were launching a new series and launching their new screens Easter Sunday. James wanted some big color to take up some real estate on their new black curtain. He also wanted to free up all his scenic LEDs for back/side light for a season.

They turned to LED tape. It had been almost a year since they did their first incarnation of LED tape with clear Coroplast https://churchstagedesignideas.com/diffused-led-tape/ and they had most of the supplies still in storage.

They built 5 giant Coroplast walls out of 12′ long 1×4 wood and 8′ long 1×4 wood. They skinned with semi transparent Coroplast accordingly. The walls had jacks on the back so they could stand up on their own and be moved around if needed. To add some branding to go with the series, they purchased 3 rolls of silver tape from Home Depot and made “greater than” symbols on each flat.

To light up the walls, they took their old tape out of storage and purchased several more rolls. Cutting the tape in half and attaching the tape to 8′ 1x2s worked swell last year, so they rinsed and repeated the same process. They wanted to be able no not use the crummy 4 pin connectors/extensions so they attached each 8′ led tape strip to a 25′ section of 22/4 alarm cable. In all they had 30 led sticks. To attach to the walls, they simply stapled the strips to the upstage side of the wall stiles.

For control, they purchased four 24-channel 8-way decoders from Amazon. The tape was wired in pairs to give them individual control of each panel. On their console, they patched in 15 “generic RGB” fixtures. Having 15 individual panels patched gave them the ability to do some great chase effects for worship looks and 3 color fans for static looks.

To fill out the look, they used some 8′ tall R 40 strips wetheyhad in storage from a theater and kept them parked mostly at 30% for a nice brown glow.

The great part of this set was there wasn’t a ton of cutting custom lengths of wood. When they were done with the set, they were able to easily dismantle it, store, and re-use the wood for future endeavors. The 30 tape sticks with 25′ cable would be easy to re-use for awesome tape sets.

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9 responses to “LED Wave Pattern”

  1. Jennifer Tucker says:

    That’s one hard working and talented husband I have. Just the one. I only have one.

    • Gary Brownell says:

      Great job! I like that you faced the LED tape toward the wall for a nice glow and not directly at the audience.

  2. justin says:

    Looks Great! What lights did you put between the panels? Are those incandescent par cans or led par cans?

  3. James Tucker says:

    Hey Justin.

    The fixtures between the set pieces are some old old Altman R40 8′ strip lights loaded with 45 watt lamps. I “rescued” them from a theater a while back.

  4. Tobie Smoke th says:

    In regards to the decoders, did you have any issues addressing them dmx? I have the same decoder, and I cannot get it to communicate with my lighting console. The 10 FUN switch is off, I have tried to assign different addresses to it with no luck. In the FUN mode the unit works great. Also in dmx mode it passes dmx without issue.

  5. Tobie Smoke th says:

    The name is Tobie Smith, not Tobie Smoke th (stupid auto text)

  6. Jesse says:

    With the decoders you used did you experience any flicker on camera from the LED strips? I’m using the same set up and I’m getting some flicker. enough to be distracting

  7. James Tucker says:

    Jesse, I never saw this and its been a few months… sorry.

    No flicker on our 3 JVC cameras on Imag or stream, If you are shooting some B roll with a DSLR with some insanely high frame rate, you will see flicker.

  8. James Tucker says:

    Jesse, I never saw this and its been a few months… sorry.

    No flicker on our 3 JVC cameras on Imag or stream, If you are shooting some B roll with a DSLR with some insanely high frame rate, you will see flicker.

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