Stage Designs

Folded Inward

Chris Monson from Faith Chapel in Billings, MT brings us this epic stage design.

From Chris: Our winter 2017-2018 stage design was a fairly intense build with quite a bit of technical complexity. We decided early on that we wanted to build some large scale low resolution LED panels and combine that with projection mapped video to create a very large amount of space to display visual content in a variety of formats. I’ll go through each major element of the set and touch briefly on what it consisted of and how it was constructed.

LED Panels
I’ll talk through our LED panels first as they were probably the most time consuming part of this build. We wound up creating 10 individual 6’x9.5′ panels using WS2811 LED pixel nodes. The nodes come in strings spaced 6″ apart and for our panels we created a 4.5″ grid of pixels. Each panel contains 400 pixels (200′ of pixel nodes) and is broken up into 4 50′ long sections for attaching to the controller. We used four HolidayCoro 16 output controllers with two 350 watt 12v power supplies per controller to drive all of the panels. The pixels were punched through holes drilled in black coroplast. The coroplast was then attached to welded metal frames with wood supports on the back side to minimize sagging.

Projection Screens
The projection screens were very straight forward. They were designed for front projection which simplified the construction of the support structure. The frames were constructed of wood and the projection surfaces were made using white coroplast. As with the LED Panels, the projection panels were 6’x9.5′. The projection for the panels was provided by four 15k lumen Eiki projectors using medium long throw lenses. The projectors were used as converged pairs to create two projection. Each projector pair covered two sets of the 90 degree projection surfaces.

Vertical LED Strips
In addition to the LED panels we rigged some higher density LED strips off each truss. Each truss got 8 of these vertical strips at 8.5″ long each. These strips are APA102 strips and were driven by PixelPushers. This is a system we already had in our inventory, and as a point of comparison, in our opinion the HolidayCoro controllers are quite a bit superior to the PixelPushers. We will likely be swapping these out in the future.

General Lighting Rig
Our lighting rig for this set consisted of:

4 Robe ColorWash 575’s
4 Robe ColorSpot 575’s
6 Elation Platinum Spot 5R Pro’s
8 Elation Platinum Beam 5R’s
16 Chauvet Intimidator Wash Zoom 350 IRC’s
10 Elation WW4 LE Blinders
16 Chauvet ColorBand Pix LED Bars
12 Blizzard Toughpar RGBAW LED Pars

Software and Control
Lighting control was handled using Lightforge. All pixel control was handled through a custom piece of software that allowed for pixel mapped video as well as procedural effects taking into account the X Y and Z positions of each pixel. Projection mapping was handled through a separate piece of custom software that allows for dynamic mapping of multiple outputs of pre-rendered content onto whatever surfaces we need. Both of these pieces of software were controlled from Lightforge via Artnet, Midi Show Control, and Midi Timecode. This all can obviously be accomplished a variety of ways but that is what we decided would work best for us in our implementation.

Full plans and light plots:
https://cdn.faithchapel.cc/Blogs/StageDesign/Christmas_2017/Christmas+2017+Plots.pdf

Equipment and Fixture Reports:
https://cdn.faithchapel.cc/Blogs/StageDesign/Christmas_2017/Fixture+Report.pdf
https://resources.faithchapel.cc/blogs/Blogs/StageDesign/Christmas_2017/Equipment+Report.pdf

Blender Concept Art Project
https://cdn.faithchapel.cc/Blogs/StageDesign/Christmas_2017/Christmas+2017+Previs.blend

Capture Pre-Vis Project File:
https://cdn.faithchapel.cc/Blogs/StageDesign/Christmas_2017/Christmas+2017+v1.2.c2p

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Dark Passenger Floating Arcs

3 responses to “Folded Inward”

  1. Steven Hall says:

    Chris,

    This is incredible! Thank you for bringing your A game to serve the Church! Thank you for being so thorough in your description and sharing with the world how you created this without breaking the bank. I’m blown away. We need to become friends and hang out! You are awesome! Thank you for sharing your gift!

    ,Steven

  2. Bodie Maas says:

    What custom software are you using for the pixel LED’s? haven’t been able to find anything that uses procedural effects and video content.

  3. Kent Coleman says:

    Mic Drop!
    Awesome Job!!!!1
    Thank you very much for sharing your teams’ gifts and talents

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