Stage Designs

Crowned in LED

Michael Martin from TrueNorth Church in North Augusta, SC brings us this LED tape crown.

From Michael: After talking with our youth team, we landed on wanting to incorporate their logo for their youth event, 180 Weekend. We also knew that we wanted to be able to frame the center screen and add blinders.

Materials:

  • Lumber
  • LED Strip Lighting
  • 20 LED Decoder Boxes
  • 20 power supplies
  • Uni-strut
  • Par cans
  • Black paint

Techniques:

We first built a basic structure to hold the LED strip lighting. Then, we made each of the individual shapes using furring strips (1”x2”).

For the center piece (the 180 Weekend Logo), we added LED strips to the front and the inside of the furring strips. We also added white cloth to the inside of the shapes. For cloth, we used king size bed sheets from Walmart. This was much cheaper then trying to purchase cloth from a fabric store.

One of the greatest challenges came from attempting to mount the LED tape to the structure. The adhesive that comes on the back of the tape is not strong enough to hold the tape over long runs. We found that clear zip ties worked the best in holding the strip to the wooden frame. When the LED strip is on, the zip ties are not visible.

We purchased our LED materials off of Amazon (made in China) to help keep the cost down. With this, there are some quirks. These boxes do not work well when chained with DMX. We found that running into the first box DMX and then chaining the remaining 19 boxes with Cat5 worked the best.

The original idea for this set was to add blinders, however, our budget did not allow for this. To get the feel of blinders we utilized par cans. We placed the cans on both sides of the screen and then added two diamond clusters in the middle of the logo.

For our par cans, we attached two 10’ sticks of uni-strut together and mounted them to our back truss using two half couplers.

Screened Dove Modern Antiquity

8 responses to “Crowned in LED”

  1. Chad says:

    What do you cover the LED strips with to give it more of a glow effect? Anything?

    • Michael Martin says:

      I actually don’t cover them in anything. That is just the LED strip itself. However, I do use heavy haze (especially at this event), which makes the strip look great!

  2. mark manley says:

    Following! looks great

  3. Madison Henson says:

    What was the total cost for this set design?

  4. Jonathan Shepherd says:

    This looks great! What LED’s do you have on the floor?

  5. Jeremy Skeete says:

    This looks great! Did you place the interior led strips behind or in front of the sheet?

  6. Austin Pluskot says:

    What model/brand of LED tape did you use for this project?

  7. kenny ortiz says:

    what are the measurements for the triangles

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