Hope in a Ceiling

Brent Dickson from Arran Lake Baptist Church in Fayetteville, NC brings us this great combo of ceiling tiles and giant letters.

From Brent: We had built a backdrop based on Wrapped in Ceiling in earlier in the year, and we wanted to incorporate most of the design into a Christmas design. Our sermon series was “The Thrill of Hope” so we decided to make a large cut out of the word hope.

We purchased 4×8′ birch plywood from Lowes as well as some 2x4s and 2×2 to strengthen the thin plywood. We made a template in Illustrator and projected each letter onto each piece of plywood for tracing. After cutting the letters out with a jigsaw we glued the 2x4s and 2x2s to the back of the letters because we did not want any fasteners to show. We were able to attach L brackets with screws to the back of the 4x2s and fasten the letters to the floor. We then attached the letter to the wall with 2x2s used as stand offs.

We decided to take the white panels out behind the text to add contrast. We had planned to paint the letters white but the birch wood looked so good with the colored light we just left it as it was.

We had also considered running Christmas lights around the edge of the letters but decided the clean look we had was great. We ran about 30 strands of lights around the perimeter of the stage to make it a bit more Christmassy.

The text is 7 feet tall and we used Bebas Neue font.

The ceiling tiles are lit with Bizzard Hotbox EXAs and the text is lit with 4 rouge R1X spots. This allows us to reposition the light on the text or use gobos.

The cost of the text was less than 300 bucks. The ceiling tile backdrop was about 1200 including the tiles, grid and hardware; we plan to reinstall it after Christmas.