Matthew Olson from First Baptist Church of Temple Terrace in Tampa, FL brings us this stage design for a 2015 DNOW event which took place over Valentines Day weekend.
The theme was “What’s love got to do with it?” and was based off of 1 Corinthians 13:2, which talks about having enough faith to remove mountains but not having love equaling to having nothing. They decided to make a mountain set with a big heart in front of it.
The mountains were made out of left-over canvas that they had used as part of the 2012 DNOW set and was formed with scaffolding and clamps. They already owned all of these materials. Originally, the canvas was going to be painted to look like mountains and lit with pars, but the painter couldn’t commit to their timeline so instead they painted the mountains with light. For this, they used 12 Chauvet ColorPallets (6 on each side of the stage). They had a total of 20 ColorPallets, so they used the remaining 8 to create some ambient lighting in the room off-stage.
For a color wash on the stage, they used 16 Chauvet Colorado 1’s. The rest of the lighting for the stage came from 12 par cans used to create a stage wash light.
The front of the heart was made out of sheet metal, and the rest of the heart was wood. They painted the entire thing a burgundy red color. The inside of it was hollow and had 1 horizontal and 1 vertical brace inside of it. The letters were held off of the face of the heart by around an inch with pieces of PVC acting as spacers, and then sheet metal screws were screwed into the metal face of the heart. The face of the heart was made of metal so that during the dedication time during the weekend they could use magnets and attach the students’ dedication messages to the face of the heart which would be on display all year.
To achieve the glowing effect from the lettering on the heart, they used LED tape attached to the backs of the letters. Each letter was soldered and wired individually, but all 4 letters were eventually connected to a single DMX – SPI controller and a single power supply. All cabling for the heart was 26 gauge cable. They harvested this from “bad” Cat-5 cables they had laying around in their server room. The maximum power draw down that cable should have been 12V@2A, which was within boundaries of what that wire could withstand. The total cost for the heart (materials, LEDs, and controllers) was around $125.
Materials for the heart lighting:
LED Tape ($10)
DMX – SPI ($23)
120V AC – 12V 30W DC Converter ($15.25)
Credits:
Production Manager – Matt Olson
Lighting Designer / Operator – Ken Boyd
Set Construction – Bobby Vetzel
330SM Director – Jody P Clouse
FBCTT Pastor – Paul Purvis
Speaker – Rudy Hartmann
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