Ceiling Crawling

Anthony Eden from The Salvation Army – NSW/ACT Combined Youth in North Parramatta, NSW brings us this cool use of LED tape.

From Anthony: We recently ran a Sydney-wide combined youth church event at an off-site venue. We built a parallel lines set piece from LED Tape to fly above the stage. This added a new perspective on the space, and some additional depth to the lighting.

The set piece consisted of 20x 5m RGBWW LED Tape Strips, attached to 4x 5m long boards made of black, corrugated plastic sheeting (Coroflute/Coroplast) with timber supports on the back.

We used the following components (all sourced from eBay, AliExpress, and the local hardware store):

* 20x 5m RGBWW LED Strip Tape (with black backing)
* 20x 4ch DMX Decoders
* 20x 4A 12V DC PSU
* 100m 5-core wire
* 40m timber
* 5x black plastic boards (2250 x 1220 x 2.5mm)
* Solder, Black Paint, Screws, Hot Glue Guns, & Rope

The plastic/timber boards were constructed off-site in 8 pieces, then joined together on-site into 4 long boards. The LED tape was then hot-glue-gunned onto the boards by a team of glue professionals. We then flew the assembled boards above the stage using rope and cable ties. The boards were very light, and it didn’t take much to get them up safely. The main issue was raising them consistently as not to flex the boards too much.

DMX Decoder boards were pre-assembled and addressed, ready to patch into the cable looms from each set of LED tape. Each one of these decoder boards correlated to one 5m board flown above the stage.

This set piece was time consuming to assemble on-site, but would suit a more permanent venue very well. It was very effective, and fairly simple to construct.

Further details and equipment links are on my website: https://mediarealm.com.au/articles/recent-work-the-salvation-army-sydney-youth-councils-2018/