Stage Designs

Throwback: Extrusion

Gabriel Guevara from Iglesia Bautista VidaNueva in San Salvador, El Salvador brings us this design from their youth conference. (Originally posted October 2012)

This year’s theme was LUX (a latin word for light). Going for an organic look, they didn’t use any LED lighting or fluorescent light. Instead, they lit up the whole place with incandescent light bulbs of all shapes and styles.

They covered the middle area with black fabric that they had left from a previous design, and for the sides they made panels out of cardboard that they hung from the ceiling with fisher’s line. They used about 30 5×5 foot cardboard panels that they cut and extruded to make the texture.

To project over the black surface, they used three wide stripes of sheer matte fabric that hung from the ceiling to the floor. Then they video mapped their motion backgrounds onto them with a projector that was located at the back of the room, and kept the lyrics on the central screen using the overhead projector that was already installed.

On the front, they installed four wooden pallets – two on each side of the stage. They attached and wired 125 mini sockets to the pallets. On the last day of the conference, there was a calling for those who wanted to be light and shine outside their comfort zone. Each one of these decisions was represented with a light bulb that they threaded in as a metaphor for shining.

They put those whole design together in one day since the conference began on a Monday night.

They got each cardboard panel for about $3 at a cardboard manufacturer. They re-used fabric and got the wooden pallets for free from a transportation company. For the electrical supplies, they purchased 150 mini sockets, around 35 regular sockets, and all the light bulbs that attach to them – plus all the wires and adapters for about $200 since they purchased them in bulk. So the whole budget, including some last minute supplies, was about $350.

 

Wooden Confetti Ripple and Letter

2 responses to “Throwback: Extrusion”

  1. Susan Jensen says:

    Love this idea! Looks great and the symbolism with the light bulbs is awesome!

  2. Chad Pressley says:

    so how do you extrude carboard like that? it look awesome. Is it just cutting horizontal lines and then bending the cardboard?

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