Text Stage Design

The North Point Ministries team from North Point Community Church brings us this design for their series “Text”. (Originally posted September 2014)

The text panels were single sided milky acrylic sheets. They originally came in 5’ x 10’ panels, which were then cut out mechanically into many different predetermined sizes by a company in Cumming, GA called Iron Spirits. Iron Spirits also did all the text, which was cut out of vinyl and placed on the acrylic.

They used solid U-channel cut to size and attached to the top of each panel to give them a rigid structure from which to hang each panel. They accomplished this by first drilling two holes through the top of the U-channel. They used these two holes to bolt two I-loops on either side of the channel in such a way as to evenly distribute the weight between these two points. Then they slid the acrylic sheet into the channel and using a drill press drilled holes every 2’ along the U-channel. They ran bolts through the structure, attaching the acrylic to the U-channel.

Then they hung all the panels via aircraft cable from pre-determined points, which they laid out along four of their upstage grid pipes. This allowed them to have four layers of depth to the design. Each hanging point also had a turnbuckle placed in line at the top so that they could easily balance each panel.

The larger panel that consisted of a rather long scripture verse located on the right side of the stage was actually too much text to fit on a single panel, so they had to sow two panels together using fishing line. It was a very interesting solution to a design verses materials problem.

Their 6 High End studio colors were hung evenly behind the panels in order to wash the design with color. They also hung their 6 Mac 250s in front of the design to give them additional options for front lighting the design.

One of the really “cool” factors of this set was that they used their HD30 projector in the back of the room to project a masked out image of the cursor. They looped a video that turned the cursor on and off making the physical printed cursor on the end of the actual word “TEXT” look like it was blinking.