Alex Robinson from Capital Area Christian Church in Mechanicsburg and Etters, PA brings us this digital looking design. (originally posted May 2016)
This design was created for a series called “Games People Play.” They wanted it to have an arcade inspired theme. In order to give it a Pacman kind of look, they took a cue from “Big Baller” with half styrofoam balls for the background and used LED tape to create a border around it and give it a Pacman board style look. They separated the panels to provide some drama and stretch the full width of the stage.
For the outside columns, they used white cardboard boxes from U-Line lit from above and below. This was to emulate 8-bit designs, with the boxes looking more like large “pixels.”
These outside columns were actually freestanding, using a tall thin frame that was built for a previous stage design. (This allowed them to move the column on house right to get to a baptistery built into the stage.)
They were originally going to lay out the back panels to have more LED tape strip lines cutting into styrofoam balls (similar to Pacman maze) but time constraints ruled this out (see original SketchUp ideas).
What kind of backer board did you use to put the balls on, and what size balls did you use?
We used 4×8 hardboard (cheap thin backing board) painted flat black and mounted on 4×8 flats we already had. The balls were setup on a 6″ grid.