Stage Designs

Throwback: Cardboard Castle

The Central Production Team from Christ’s Church of the Valley in Peoria, AZ brings us this cardboard castle set design.

CCV has four campus locations and all stages are designed in the same fashion. This set was used as part of The Story series, during the topic “Kings and Kingdoms”.

The goal of this set was to create abstract boxes in the shape of a castle. Video and lighting were projected onto the boxes and uplighting was used along the entire length of the boxes. Primary lighting used was Vari-Lite 1000’s and Mega-Lite LED Striplights.

The boxes were speckled with paint to give texture and lighting dimension. To speed up the process, each box was unfolded and laid on the ground. Paint was watered down and filled inside 2 gallon tank sprayers. Each box was sprayed once over with grey and once over with tan. After drying, the boxes were closed shut with clear tape.

The boxes were all different shapes and sizes – some small, some extremely large, some square, and some rectangular. The boxes were fixed together on stage with gaff tape. A castle design was on paper, but the finished product really took shape once the boxes were stacked piece by piece. For continuity, cardboard strips were cut and lined along the bottom of the drum/bass/electric guitar risers.

This set was easy to build, but the process was definitely time consuming! Overall it was a great set for volunteers to help with, it was relatively inexpensive and everything was recyclable.

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LED Ovation Open Geometry

5 responses to “Throwback: Cardboard Castle”

  1. This looks super cool!

  2. Mike Edwards says:

    That looks awesome! Just wondering where you got the boxes and how many you used of each size.

  3. Kori says:

    Love this! Where did you order the boxes from and what sizes? What were your stage dimensions?

  4. alexis says:

    We love this!
    Can you tell us how many boxes you used and the rough break down of different sizes.
    Also, were you able to find a box company to get this boxes from?
    Thanks

    • Kori says:

      Blessing from The Perfecting Church in NJ! We hold our services at the TD Bank Arts Center which has a 60x30ft stage. We built a 45×10 ft wall and we ordered 170 boxes from uline.com. We did some treatments to the boxes to make it look like an artistic stones… We added chains to represent an old jail. Came out beautifully! I will send you some pix or instructions if you’d like. Email me at kori@theperfectingchurch.org if you’d like! Have fun!

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