Clean Plates and Leftovers

Porter Cyr from Real Life Church in Myrtle Beach, SC brings us this great combination of textures.

(7) sheets of 3′ x 6′ white Coroplast from Home Depot ($13 a sheet)
(1) wide roll of heavy duty aluminum foil from Sam’s Club
(1) roll of black Velcro
(1) roll of Gaffers tape (just used to hold the aluminum foil down to the back of the shapes)
(7) Solena Max Bar 28 RGB 28-Watt DMX LED Wash Lights from PSSL.com (already had these)

Spent $100 total on the materials (except for lights which were $99.99 per fixture brand new).

From Porter: Our pastor loved the stage design we used for Christmas (also featured on the site entitled “Cotton Christmas”) and was sad to see it go all of a sudden since Christmas only lasted for a month. I then thought of how I could incorporate elements used from Christmas but have it transcend the seasons after hearing what our pastor said. In the past for other projects, he and his wife loved designs that were geometric/abstract, so I figured this would be a good direction to move toward.

The whole design is made up of three different sized shapes made from Coroplast:

• Large diamond made up of 3′ x 3′ right triangles (8 total)
• Smaller 2′ x 2′ diamonds (8 total)
• Smaller 2′ x 2′ right triangles (12 total)

We found from Christmas and this design that using a rounded edge razor blade over a pointed edge razor blade gave us the best results when cutting the Coroplast. Just like the design from Christmas, we intentionally crinkled the aluminum foil on the select shapes to give some texture and visual interest. Also from Christmas, we discovered that mounting the shapes using double sided gaffer’s tape started to fail on us by the time Christmas was over because we didn’t take into consideration the big changes in temperature throughout the week when the heating and air would be off in the sanctuary when there was no one there. So, we brainstormed another solution for adhesion because we didn’t want to do anything too permanent that would leave a mess behind or require patching screw/nail holes when we would change up the design for the future. We concluded that Velcro would be the best solution, and it’s been holding up like a champ so far! We cut them into strips about an inch wide and applied one strip of Velcro per corner to the back of each shape. To tie the middle screen into the design, I used geometric video backgrounds for praise & worship as well as a splash screen with a background of similar shapes and made it the same color as the backdrop. Our pastor said he really loved the way the purple showed up on camera from Christmas, and he wanted to keep that going forward for now. It only took two evenings to put it all together with the help of a couple awesome volunteers of ours! We’ve been finding that it is very possible to put together a stage design with excellence on a budget, and we hope it inspires other churches to do the same!