Stage Designs

Cardboard Blast

Luke Howard from First Baptist Church of Opelika in Alabama brings us this explosion of panels.

Taking inspiration from North Point’s Christmas set, Luke took donated cardboard mattress boxes and cut strips to resemble wood. They painted the 6’x8′ mattress boxes 3 different shades of gray. The idea with this was to get different colors throughout the set. After cutting random lengths, they laid out their design on the ground before installing it. They used black tie line to support the cardboard from the truss. This was difficult figuring out how they should be attached but after trial and error, they discovered the quickest way was to start with the lowest one and work their way up.

Luke also built custom Coroplast tubes. Using a coroclaw, he scored the outside of four corners of Coroplast. By doing this, he was able to fold it into a square. He also scored the front facing section of Coroplast along the back so it cut down the thickness in half and allowed more light through. On the inside, he attached LED Strip Tape and soldered a piece of cat5 cable to hook it in from the outside. Then, using hot glue and packing tape, he glued the tube shut and built caps for the end so you couldn’t see directly into the LED tape. Then using Cat5 and a DMX decoder, he was able to control the color of the LED strips from the console.

The outer cardboard pieces were lit using LED bars and the inner sections of cardboard were pixel mapped through a projector so they could use motion backgrounds for greater flexibility. They also used solid colors if they wanted to match the outer sections.

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Purple Spread Dropped Wood

4 responses to “Cardboard Blast”

  1. Jake Wandel says:

    Sweet stage! Looks great in pics, I bet it was even better live.

    • Can I get some more information on how you used the Cat5 and a DMX decoder. We have a Chauvet light board and would love to be able to do this at our church. What type of DMX decoder did you use? What about the LED tape? Thanks for any information!

  2. I love the visual energy this set brings. How long will it stay up?

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