Stage Designs

Throwback: The Junkyard

Derek Studt from Generations Christian Church in Trinity, Florida brings us this junkyard masterpiece from their Easter services.

They wanted to communicate the message that Christ has taken our junk and made it beautiful because of what He’s done on the cross. So they built a cross using junk found in a local junkyard. The cross was 12′ tall and was built during special music in 2′ sections at a time. For Easter weekend, the cross remained in its place. was torn down into piles of rubble and then rebuilt (with additional pieces) to create the word “love”. They used fence pipe as the main spine and welded small brackets to them to attach the junk to the spine using mostly zip ties.

Each piece was labeled and color coded so it was clear where it fit when it was configured as the cross or the love. Derek says if he had it to do over again, he would make a custom fitting that was a more snug fit than the fence coupler.

Each section weighed between 15-25 lbs, which made the cross quite top heavy. To solve that issue, they safetied the cross at 3 different points from the catwalk and attached a tilt back support to the spine and sandbagged it.

Rough and Clear Disco Wall

8 responses to “Throwback: The Junkyard”

  1. Ryan Spencer says:

    Very cool illustration. Was this all done during one service?

  2. chris says:

    that is straight-up one of the most creative things i’ve seen in a long time. very cool

  3. Derek Studt says:

    Thanks guys! It took a huge team of really awesome people to pull this together.

    Ryan…The building of the cross was put together on stage section by section during the closing song element of our Palm Sunday weekend services. Then for Easter weekend, the cross was up at the beginning of the service and the illustration of God taking our junk and turning it into something beautiful was a common theme throughout Easter. During the closing element of our Easter services, the cross was deconstructed with the musical interlude B.E. from the Aftermath album by Hillsong. Then, the band played Aftermath live, and during that song, the pieces were built into the LOVE. We did this for all 4 weekend services both weeks, and countless rehearsals getting the choreography right.

  4. Jeremy McKenzie says:

    You can see how we put it all together here.

    http://vimeo.com/22946160 – Palm Sunday
    http://vimeo.com/22914205 – Easter

  5. Caleb says:

    wow, amazing. i am interested in how you made the background with the squares and what they were made out of.

  6. ken says:

    I am curious about the squares also …

  7. We built a series of grids using 2x2s, that were spaced out in two foot squares. We then cut down sheets of coroplast, and stapled them on the back side of the grid. The grids than sat in front of our white scrim in the back, and wood frames wrapped in white fabric for the legs.

    • Forgot to mention: Not all of the grid had coroplast panels, only about 40%. The rest were left open and showed the white background through the grid. We used a mix of white and black coroplast on the grid itself, arranged in a random pattern.

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