Action Stage

Sean and Corinne Noble from Genesis Church in McKinney, TX brings us this superhero stage design.

Here are the details from Sean and Corinne:

This month we are talking about “Standing up for what’s right, even when others don’t”. Superheroes are great examples of this important lesson for all Christians.

We were able to work the theme of the month into our entry way and a little into the main lobby of the church.

If you are familiar with Oriental Trading, than I’m sure you will recognize some of our decor for this month. The info table has some awesome Superhero Word Cutouts as well as a fun Superhero Photo Stand-up for a nice photo opportunity for kids and even adults. All of these decorations were left over from another Superhero theme we did last year.

In the entrance to our room, you will see some fun buildings we made for this theme. All you need to make the buildings are some cardboard boxes (any size will do), big rolls of kraft paper, and some yellow cardstock or yellow post-it notes for the windows. You can use boxes you already have on hand, or even call stores in the area to see if they have any boxes you can pick up for free. I would highly recommend investing in the big rolls of kraft paper. You will find lots of uses for it. If you don’t have the budget for the paper, you have a couple other options: spray paint or table cloths. Those options won’t look as polished, but they will do the trick.

Thanks to the great graphics provided by 252 Basics, we were able to use those for our side banners this month. These are the motion graphics that you receive when you purchase the Feature Presentation videos. We also hung some of the Superhero Word Cutouts from the ceiling around the room. Oriental Trading has some great and affordable paper cutouts for many occasions, but I have always had problems with them curling around the edges over time and they are only one-sided. When the edges curl, they don’t look as good when they’re hanging, and it causes them to fall down. When you hang cutouts that are one-sided, they spin around and you always seem see the blank side. To remedy these problems, I bought extra cutouts (two for each one I wanted to hang), stapled them back to back (you could also glue them), used a single hole punch to make a hole in the top, and tied a piece of clear fishing line to each sign for hanging.

On both sides of the stage, we used more of the buildings like the ones in the entrance to create the feel of a city. On stage left, we put a coat rack we had from a previous set and covered it in capes and masks. On stage right, we created a scene that looks like it came out of a comic book. We got cardboard cutout of a flying superhero, and strung it from the ceiling above the stage. We put the cardboard cutout of a villain underneath the superhero to make it look like they were fighting. We already had the cutout of the villain from our previous month’s set design, and were able to re-use it. Oriental Trading also has some superhero party tape that looks like the yellow caution tape you see at crime scenes. Instead of saying “caution”, it says superhero action words like “bam, ka-pow, boom, and krunch”. I would suggest getting several rolls of it, since each roll only has 20 feet of tape. We used it on the front of all of our stage pieces to add another bit of color. We used more of the superhero word cutouts on the stage, but we did something a little extra to them to make them pop (and keep them from curling). We hot-glued the cutouts to some pieces of foam board we had left over from a previous project, and cut the foam board out with an exacto knife to fit the cutouts. The cutouts went from flimsy paper to 3D signs!