Christmas Designs

Christmas Aurora

Jim Cucchiara from Aberdeen First Pentecostal Church in Aberdeen, MS brings us this Christmas bright aurora borealis look for their stage.

They decided to try their hand at creating their first unique stage design for their church school’s (Pentecostal Christian Academy) Christmas play. They knew the location setting of the play was the town of Bethlehem, and the time was at night. So they decided to create the silhouette of the town inside their LED wall, then create a field of stars above.

The lower, back wall you see (they call the LED Wall), with the 6 illuminated panels, was a custom wall they designed when their church upgraded to a professional lighting system. They basically built a wall with a 4 ft. space behind it (the inside space was all painted bright white), and 6 rectangular openings (approx. 80″ by 45″) covered by pieces of translucent vinyl. There were 2 wooden, rectangular end pieces painted black, which double as their access panels to get behind the wall. There were 6 Chauvet COLORdash Batten-Quad 12 mounted to the floor in line with each translucent panel. Each piece of vinyl was held in place by velcro, as were the outer black panels. So they can control the color of the wall via computer control in their multimedia control center.

The upper, back wall above the LED Wall (they call the Wall Washer Wall) was painted flat black and had two support bars with rope and pulleys attached to an L-bracket at the top of the wall to hang whatever they please. They also have 8 ADJ Mega Bar RGBA 42″ fixtures mounted to the base of the wall, which illuminate that wall from bottom to top.

Supply List:
– 2 Fuloon (6 meter by 3 meter) 600 LED Outdoor Party String Fairy Wedding Curtain Light 8 modes (cool white) from Amazon.com for $40 each.
– 2 Voile Drapes (33ft. by 9ft.) from Georgia Stage ( www.gastage.com ) for a little under $200 without any alterations.

Brian Rehkof for Georgia Stage gave them a great education on what fabric is best and how to use it for different purposes.
They mounted the voile fabric and LED Curtains to their support bars on the Wall Washer Wall. They learned from Brian that the more you scrunch the voile material together, the more it will hide what is behind it and the more light will be reflected. So they bought material 3 times longer than they needed so they could scrunch it together more for the desired effect. They then leveled the support bars at the exact height of the fabric and placed the wall washer lights together at the bottom and behind the curtain (another suggestion from Brian).

To create the silhouette of the town of Bethlehem, they used some used cardboard boxes they obtained free from a local organization which was throwing them away. They spread the cardboard boxes out, end to end, to equal the length of the LED Wall and had one of their more artistically talented members to draw the town across the length of cardboard. Two other members were tasked with the tedious job of cutting the cardboard along the drawn line. After the cutting was complete, they simply leaned the cardboard pieces, in order, up against the inside of the LED Wall, against the translucent vinyl, and propped them up with several small pieces of scrap wood.

Finally they tested several lighting colors and schemes and eventually settled on a dark blue to make it look like a twilight evening scene. As you can see, the light from the LED Wall, all the way to the top of the Wall Washer Wall, slowly faded to black just like a night sky.

This project took a total time of 6 hours, 4 people, and cost just under $300.

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2 responses to “Christmas Aurora”

  1. Randall Carmeans says:

    Bro Cucchiara and his Multimedia Team put everything they have into this ministry! We are so blessed to have them here at AFPC!

  2. cherish says:

    Hello saw this online and I wanted to know where you purchased your translucent vinyl from. Could you send me the product information on the type of vinyl you useed, and a possible link for the vendor you used to purchase it?

    Thank you for your time.

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