Ben Spencer from Fellowship West in Bonner Springs, Kansas brings us this design for a smaller stage.
From Ben: The squares are “natural” opaque color coroplast (love that stuff) cut to 18×18”. I alternated raising the vertical edges to give them a bit of dimension. I did that with 3/4” wooden pieces behind them, painted black. We use Chauvet Colorband led bars up-lighting these.
The vertical lights are our DIY pixel lights, made using your typical 3’ LED strip housed inside black aluminum led channels from Amazon (the curved milky white covers soften the LEDs the best), and decided to DMX with a generic 3channel decoder. Using LED strip splitters, I used one decoder per 3-pixel lights. Some black line-hide and it’s all seem less from pretty close.
For added depth, we made four extra standing braced boards and attached a pixel light to each one so we could move them to the front of the stage. The two on the edge(shown in the 2nd photo) were made with a 1×2 and a 2×4 base. The ones on the inside were made with a plywood vertical piece so we could install Edison bulbs for an added dynamic to the whole look. The Edison bulbs are all plugged into a power strip that goes to an Elation Uni Bar dimmer for easy light console control.
The whole project cost around $400 I think, which wouldn’t even get you two normal “pixel lights”. The only downside is the DIY pixels are only RGB. Note: test different led strips, because the third ones I tried were a lot more seamless, while the others showed each LED through the white cover more (which for most people is less desirable).
All in all, it’s a quality look for a lot less money.
Love this!!! Looks awesome!