Stage Designs

Parallel Bulbs

Christopher Cope from Firezone, Salvation Army Youth in New Zealand, Figi, and Tonga brings us this stage design from their 2013 Amplify creative arts camp. (Originally posted February 2013)

They wanted this year’s stage design to be simple, symmetrical, and very straight lined.  It also had to be versatile enough to accommodate the different groups (dance, drama, music) that were going to perform throughout the camp.

They ran media across three screen. In between each screen they hung two LED strips. These were homemade using LED RGB strips bought from eBay and placing them in black powder coated metal channels with a white acrylic cover. These were then controlled by RGB DMX decoder units.

They hung light bulbs from the ceiling for their previous conference, but this year they attached these to wooden beams that spanned the width of the stage that had been painted matte black. Each line of seven was on a separate dimmer channel.

They had six Chauvet Q-Spot 560 for the movers sitting at various level at the back of the stage. To provide color washes they had ten Chauvet Colorado Zoom Tour 2 and six Colorado 2s.

Media Control was with Renewed Vision’s ProVideoPlayer & ProPresenter with the a TripleHead2Go. Lighting control was with a Road Hog 3.

Floating Solar System Framed in Angles

10 responses to “Parallel Bulbs”

  1. Love this! What kind of bulbs did you use? And how much was the overall cost?

    • Chris Cope says:

      Hi Jorden, they are standard household bulbs. Frosted 70w.

      As we had the bulbs and cable from previous event we only had to purchase the wood, screws and paint so all up around $200.

  2. What aspect ratio are your side projection screens? And did you just mask the projectors to match the ratio or did you flip the projectors 90°?

    • Chris Cope says:

      Hey Reyn, the side screen are 16:9 flipped 90°. And rather than flip the projectors we used the masking tool in ProPresenter.

  3. Ok cool wasn’t sure just because a video guy I’ve worked with said projectors weren’t designed to run on their side. It didn’t give you any problems?

  4. Pat Laeger says:

    Chris, this design is awesome! We copied it on a smaller scale as we started a new series yesterday and it was a big hit at our church. Thank you for the great work you do! Keep it up.

  5. Kyle Goebel says:

    Great Look! I was looking to do something similar to this. Could you give me some insight on how you wired the bulbs? That’s my current hang-up.

    Thanks! Looks awesome

    • Chris Cope says:

      Cheers Kyle. Sorry I haven’t checked this page in some time. If you are still wanting to know it is fairly simple. Each bar (row of 7 bulbs) are daisy chained to a single plug at one end. Wired in a series circuit, positive – positive, negative – negative, earth – earth, down the bar to the plug. Then checked by an electrician friend to ensure they were safe.

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