Light-Filled Boxes

John Wallace from Grace Capital Church in Pembroke, New Hampshire brings us this stage inspired by the stage at the 2014 Salt Conference. 

John had $500 to spend on the stage, so he wanted to make sure he could get multiple uses out of the design.

He started the process by building the side “ladders” out of 2x3s. They were painted white and then attached to the back wall. They were 14 feet tall and were built in two sections…a 8 foot and a 6 foot section. In previous sets, he’s used Coroplast to achieve this look but he liked the shadows and texture that the real wood adds. After these were attached, he hung 8 cord sets (Hemma from Ikea) on each side and just let them dangled at random lengths.

Then he built the boxes. They were made out of common pine boards from Home Depot with a particle board face to hold the sockets. He built them in 3 different lengths for design purposes. They were 8 inches tall by 6 inches deep and the lengths were 30″, 39″, and 48″. Then he took a hole saw bit and drilled the various holes for the lightbulb sockets.

An important thing for him was to make sure he got a lot of bang for the buck with the lighting sockets. He wanted to make sure he could use them on a different set design, so he went with the Hemma cord sets from Ikea. They were $5 and are roughly 15ft long. He was able to preserve the length of all the cord sets and just use power strips on the back of every box, so that there was just one master power cable coming from each box. He had somewhere in the range of 60 cord sets, but they are all able to be reused at full length.

The bulbs used were 40w appliance bulbs from 1000bulbs.com and given the quantity, they were very inexpensive.

The boxes were attached to the back wall with cleats, so they were not fully flush. This was intentional to allow the excess power cords room to stay bundled and the power cord to fall behind it. He intentionally placed them on the back wall to look random. He tried not to create a specific pattern.

Next, he installed four 2×4 on the back wall, and then attached the horizontal pieces of wood with a row of “blinders” in between them. He ended up using shiplap for the horizontal pieces. Between they were about half the price of the regular pine boards of the same size.

The row of blinders were just clip on utility lights from Home Depot with spot light bulbs. They were attached to a blacked out 2×3 that was attached to the 2×4 studs. (They had these lights from a previous stage design.)

All the LEDs they had purchased already so there was no extra purchases in that area.

One of the other uses for the light boxes that they have in mind is to cover the boxes with a piece of Coroplast. This will not only give them diffused look to the exposed bulb look that they have now, but they can also point a projectors at it and do some video mapping and put lyrics, graphics, or movies images on it which will be loads of fun.