Stage Designs

Chandelier and Band Shell

Sean Bolinger from Christian Faith Center in Federal Way, WA brings us this cool chandelier and band shell look for their stage. (Originally posted November 2014)

This design was for their Celebrate Women’s conference. For this year, they wanted to create the look of an old theatre but with a modern twist.

They looked around at different years of the Academy Awards and also pictures of old theatres and decided the first thing they wanted was big arches with a wood paneled wall underneath the lowest arch. For the arches, they built a framing system with 2×6’s and 2×4’s creating the levels and depth of the arch. Then they laid out pieces of ½” plywood and in an arch type shape and then, using a stick of proper length, they made basically a large protractor to make their lines and know where to cut the wood.

After it was all cut, they attached the surfaces of the arches to the framing system. Then they painted it all a high gloss white and in the area separating the arches, they laid in color temperature changing white LED strips that go from 2500k to 6500k that gave them some flexibility in the way it looked. They didn’t use RGB strips because they did not want the arches to look like a rainbow as much as possible.

The peak of the biggest arch was 18’ and the lowest point of the bottom arch was 12’. From outside to outside it was 34’ wide. After that, they started on the wood wall.

They took ½” plywood that had a very cool wood grain to it and cut it into 1’wide pieces and stained it a medium-light brown. Then they attached a lip on the side of each piece and laid in some RGB LED strips. They stood them up by attaching 2” PVC pipe to the back of each wood panel and that slid into a hole in a 2×4 block that had been screwed into the stage deck and then they attached the top into the back of the arch.

After that was done, they knew they wanted to build a chandelier of sorts. Sean had seen on the 2012 Academy awards some polished steel pipes with light bulbs at the top. So they decided to use that idea but flip it upside down and make a chandelier out of it. They built essentially a 5 layered circular birthday cake and drilled holes in the middle of each circle. They took 1 ¼” PVC pipe and painted it with chrome spray paint and purchased a socket with cord from IKEA which they ran through the PVC pipe. They attached the socket to the PVC pipe with silver duct tape that matched the paint. From a distance, you couldn’t see it at all.

To hold the PVC pipe in the wood, they drilled a hole through the pipe and put a bolt and washer through it to hold it up. Then they took some fabric that they had and draped it from the top of the chandelier and up into their catwalks.

Finally, to finish off the theatre look, they used globe light bulbs they had from a previous set and built a stand for them and lined the front of their stage with light bulbs. After the conference, they took down the chandelier and fabric but left up the arches and back wall to be their set for the fall season.

[tentblogger-youtube b61lnVgJD5A]

10471512_805343036155864_6100713176858564941_n

Arch Collage

DSC_0041

DSC_8251

DSC_8355

DSC_8831

DSC_9060

DSC_9110

DSC_9118

DSC_9122

DSC_9178

Final Touch Collage

IMG_3607

IMG_5460

IMG_7013

IMG_7014

Wood Wall Collage

Geared Up Stains All Over the Glass!

3 responses to “Chandelier and Band Shell”

  1. Blanton says:

    wow this is super. Looks great. What are you using to control your LED strips?

  2. Dave says:

    Great design! How did you create the bases and wire up the bulbs for the footlights? We’re looking at doing something similar for our Christmas set!

  3. That looks great! We are starting to get into using LED strips, but very new to it. What strips and controller did you get? I know we want RGB and DMX control, but can’t seem to find what works best for a look like you guys had on the wood. Thoughts? Thanks!

Leave a Reply to Blanton Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.