Christmas Designs

Angled Christmas City

Kim Miller from Ginghamsburg Church in Tipp City, OH brings us this Christmas stage design from 2012. (originally posted December 2013)

The Ginghamsburg Makeover Team set about to design a stage that would depict what it means to share the good news with an entire city of broken people. They scanned the cityscape of their own Dayton, Ohio and used it to artistically outline the stage background out of black Coroplast, folded and arranged w/ an eye on perspectives. Each building was individually drilled w/ “window” holes at 2” intervals, then hand-punched white mini-lights through the holes. Under the screen, they left spaces between flat sheets to give the eye a bit of a rest.

Their stage floor LEDs lit the walls behind the set.

On Christmas Eve they added Christmas trees, a street light, and falling snow to add to the holiday’s festive feeling. They also covered two of the buildings with custom-designed newsprint to highlight their “Good News” theme.

Good News

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4 responses to “Angled Christmas City”

  1. Joey says:

    Great looking set, I was thinking of doing something similar, but wasn’t sure on where to start, I have a church in Los Angeles and so doing this really fits the type of christmas we have. I needed to ask a couple questions though.
    1. How long did it take to complete this set.
    2. What was the cost to accurately do this.
    3. Did you guys just use a projector to project the city scape onto coroplast and then cut it out, or How did you go about doing that.
    4. lastly, what kid of lights did you use for the windows, were they the dome christmas lights, what kind of lights.

    If you could get back to me on this that would be awesome and would really be a great set for our church.
    Thanks, have a great Christmas.

  2. kim miller says:

    Hi Joey,
    1. Our set took approximately 120 people hours (20 people x 6 hours each average.)
    2. We purchased 15 sheets of black coroplast locally @ $16/sheet + 10 sets of mini lights
    3. While we’ve used an overhead projector on other projects we simply eyed this one up and sketched out a simply skyline. Some of the perspectives we honestly just worked as we went.
    4. The lights are just regular white minilights. Not gonna lie, it took a long time to push them through every hole.
    Added note: this set was so time consuming – but w/ no room for storage we offered it to another church so it could get some extra use. They brought a truck and were able to give it another life.

  3. Emily Drainville says:

    Hello! This is fantastic! I am heading stage design for the Leadership Collective Forum in Boston. I had an idea of doing something like this but was not able to think of a way to do it but I am amazed by how beautifully this is done! Could you possibly answer some questions for me?

    1. The ones that are done at angles, are they just one sheet drawn in that perspective or were there two sheets that were put together?

    2. How tall did this stand?

    3. How did you make this stand?

    4. Do you have any pictures of the process?

    Thank you so much! I am looking forward to hearing back from you!

    God Bless!

  4. kim miller says:

    Hi Emily, here are the answers to your questions.
    1) several of the sections are two pieces – or one sheet of Coroplast that’s folded top to bottom.
    2) the Coroplast comes in 8’x4′ sheets so the average height is 8′ from the stage floor but i think we pieced a couple sections closer to the center screen to allow for a taller, more varied skyline in those places.
    3) we have a unique situation in that our LED light bars are about a foot away from that back stage wall which means all the design elements need to be attached to the wall in order to catch the lights. These folded black sections are actually screwed on the edges to fasten them to the back wall… which also answers your question 3).
    4) while i usually take several pictures of each stage design we do I DID NOT take pics of this one – ack! i’m happy to answer any more questions you might have, however.
    Kim

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