Stage Designs

Lit Hive

Cody Cochran from Living Water in Olympia, WA brings us this cool hexagonal stage design. (originally posted August 2016)

From Cody: This set was designed and build for our 2016 easter and our youth conference we have once a year! Check out the message here.

When we start the creative process on our stage sets we always write what we need and don’t need, then we just work from there! Often times myself and 1 or 2 others sit in a room and just start tossing ideas out knowing what the needs are for that specific stage set. This time around we knew from the start we needed: A Cross, the word Jesus (the theme for the Easter sermon and the sermon series fallowing easter) and lots of wood tones. We also knew it needed to feel intimate but also the ability to be big, bright and colorful. Don’t ask me how we settled on the idea of using hexagons, it just came out in our design session!

Materials

20 5/8in 4×8 sheets of finish grade plywood

18 filament bulbs with black hanging sockets

LED wire lights

The Process

We started off with a wood stick framed wall we used for our last stage set bolted to our existing lighting grid above the stage. This created a great solid wall to screw the sheets of plywood to.

To create the floating look for the hexagons we flipped 2×4 blocks on edge. To mount the hexagons we used 5.5in screws through the face of the hexagon and screwed them directly into the plywood wall behind. Used 4 screws per hexagon. Getting the spacing perfect was the tough part. We just cut 2 6 inch blocks for spacers, so all of them are exactly 6 inches apart!

Once the hexagons were up we put push tacks on ever corner of every hexagon then wrapped the wired LEDs around every hexagon. This took some time because or having to loop through a hole in the wall for ever one.

One of the big things with the stage set was getting all of the hexagons to be the exact same size and cut out perfect! its a huge deal even if one is 1/4 off, it throws off all of the spacing for the entire wall. The first 2 might look fine but when you keep going you will see it for sure!

Budget

We had all of the lights from other stage sets so that was not a cost for us this time around. But if you were to buy all of the lights. (Not included uplighting)

Wire LEDs $300
Hanging sockets $200
Edison bulbs $200

The plywood we just got from a local lumber yard. You might be able to go cheaper on this I just wanted it to be finish grade. I would recommend not going any thinner then 1/2in ply if you use this big of shapes. They have a tendency to buckle pretty bad if you go low quality and use anything less then 1/2in. We used 5/8 ply witch worked good!

20 Sheets of finish grade ply wood $1300

We also use 20 ETC Selador Vivid-R LED Fixture – 11″ for up and down lighting.

IMG_7207 IMG_7213 IMG_7217 IMG_7223 IMG_7224 IMG_7225 IMG_7231 IMG_7346 IMG_7360

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5 responses to “Lit Hive”

  1. Nate says:

    Hey, what kind of LED tape did you use and did you run the wire through the plywood to keep the hexagons looking seperate? Also how many tape dmx controllers did you use if at all?

  2. Cody says:

    Hey Nate,
    We used wired LED lights. You can find them on Amazon and other places online. We didn’t need any DMX controllers for this set due to them just running off our dimmers. (they are not RGB, only a soft white) Yes we just drilled holes and ran the wire behind the wall, It was the only way we could make the hexagons look like there were floating!

  3. Neal says:

    Awesome Cody, very tastefully done. But more than that, a practical demonstration of the use of the gifting God has blessed you and your team with. Well done!

  4. Tatsiana says:

    What did you guys to make hexagons out if?

  5. Chris Ratcliff says:

    What are the dimensions of the hexagons and what paint did you use on the hexagons?

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