Stage Designs

Seeing Spots

Jarron Davis from Christian Life Church in Austin, TX brings us this awesomely circular stage design.

From Jarron: Our last few stage designs were squares or rectangles. We used 4×4 white boxes for one, we used the “floating squares” after that and then we used the fluorescent light diffusers through summer 2018. I really wanted something that looked wasn’t a square. I saw several churches doing circles and thought that was a really good look. I hit up ModScenes and purchases a lot of the hanging circles. Steven was very accommodating and helped me layout a great design.

I picked out LED Pars and Bars that had visible RGBW (some have RGBA) chips that were circular.

I did the entire set minus the large glowing orbs. The first week we revealed it, I wasn’t happy with it and knew it was missing one element to set it off. So while I was cleaning out our AV storage closet, I ran across some old homemade Sky Pan lights that we did years ago. We got the idea from Vous Church.

I thought these could be the element I was missing to set my “circle” look off but I didn’t want to do the the warm color temperature look anymore. I had the idea to use a bunch of LED tape that I had left-over from various stage sets to repurpose the Sky Pans.

First I didn’t want them silver anymore so I painted the backs black. Then I attached a medium-duty pipe clamp to the back. To save time, I left the light socket inside. If you build them new, just don’t do the light socket portion of the build.

Next, I glued the LED tape to the inside of the sky pans. It took about 4-5ft of LED tape to make the circle. The LED tape had an adhesive on the back but I didn’t trust it so I reinforced it with Gorilla glue. This was the most tedious part. I soldered 25ft of Cat6 on to the LED tape to give me a long control+power cable so that I could place the power supplies and DMX driver in an accessible spot on stage.

I wasn’t crazy about being able to see LED tape. I wanted it to be more of a “glowing orb”. So I found some large paper in our kids department. You could also use large parchment paper from a restaurant supply store.

Using Gorilla tape to attache the paper, I cut out large circles of the paper and attached it to the SkyPan. Boom. It was the glowing orb look I wanted. I had 8 of them and I just came up with a pattern on my pipe grid that worked for the look I wanted.

Each Orb has RGBW tape and I used 3 DMX decoders with power supplies. I placed one decoder Stage Left, Stage Right and Center Stage so that I didn’t need long cables.

ModScenes worked with me to design the circles within my budget. I already owned all the LED par and bar lighting. I already owned all the LED tape and drivers (roughly $400 on Amazon) and I already owned the Sky Pans (roughly $600 from HomeDepot).

I have a mixture of ETC ColorSource Par Deep Blue, Chauvet ColorDash series, and ADJ Ultra Hex series fixtures.

Next steps will be adding movers and haze to this look.

Most Popular (New) Stages – August 2018 Bible Paged

3 responses to “Seeing Spots”

  1. PASTOR PETER AWAIKPO says:

    TO BE CANDID. I LOVE THIS DESIGN.

    WE HAVE BEEN IN SEARCH OF GOOD DESIGNS LIKE THIS FOR OUR ALTAR. I WOULD BE TO KNOW WHAT IT WILL COST TO PURCHASE THIS AND FIXED IN OUR CHURCH.

    • Jarron Paul Davis says:

      Contact ModScenes.com on pricing for the smaller white circles. They will help you price what you need for your size stage.

      The sky pans (large glowing circles) from the Vous Church blog will cost you roughly $40-50 per. The LED tape and accessories for the tape from Amazon for about $300-400.

      Hope this helps.

  2. Matthew Jackson says:

    Whats the white rings lightened up by the pars and bars made of? Also how did you hook them together?

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