Flex Around the Screen

Sean Bolinger from Christian Faith Center in Federal Way, WA brings us these awesome, flexible elements.

From Sean: Back in February of 2019 we purchased LED screens for the stages for both our campuses, not enough to fill the whole stage but enough to make a focal point and then have other elements around them. Because we just spent a large amount of money buying the screens, we had to come up with very cost-effective ways of filling the space around the screens that could be reused over the next few years. We built three different elements that have been rearranged around our stages as we change the design of our screens. The three elements are: Blinder boxes, diffused LED verticals, and LED rectangles.

The blinder boxes are made up of ½” plywood, painted black, and are 8ft tall and 8in deep to conceal the backside of the work light within. We just used the standard work light that can be bought at Home Depot and put a 75watt lamp inside. The boxes were built to be able to sit on the ground or be hung in the air.

What we call the LED verticals, are just ½” plywood boxes that are open in the front. We painted the inside white and put two strips of LED tape inside and then stapled white coroplast to the front and then used black gaff tape on the edges to give the front a border that concealed the staples. We built quite a few that range from 10ft tall to 16ft tall.

The LED rectangles are made of ½” square steel tubing that was cut and welded into the rectangle shape. We then attached the LED tape to the frame using the adhesive back, but we also used tiny zip ties for every foot just in case the adhesive ever failed.

We built 18 blinder boxes, 22 LED verticals, and 12 LED rectangles and spread them across two campuses. We spent about 2000$ on all of these elements since most of the work lights for the blinder boxes we already had from previous stage sets.

We have now done 6 different stage designs in the last three years and have only spent about 300$ rearranging the stage.