Lit Lids

Brandon J. Carr from Journey Christian Church in Apopka, FL brings us this awesome pixel-driven design.

From Brandon: I saw something resembling Elation Cuepix on New Year’s Rockin Eve 2018, and thought they looked great. I saw the price tag at $1000 per unit, and started reverse-engineering them!

These are essentially pixel-driven Christmas lights, plywood, and Icee cup lids spray painted silver.

We had Paul Schultz at Krohtech get us some Brilliant Bulb Christmas lights, Falcon control boards, and Madrix Lighting Control software it takes up 8 universes since every dot is 3 channels of DMX. We use Jands Vista for the Worship Center control, and there’s a Madrix fixture file for control of playlists. Since this is pixel mapped, we have the intent and ability to run videos on it. It would be more of a low res lighting effect, but the ability is there, and with the triplewide screen running right above it, you will be able to see that the set is emulating the screen.

We spread the construction out over about 10 weeks, and total construction time was upwards of 60 hours. They are a labor of love, but the result is amazing!

We started by cutting 3mm plywood into squares, and cutting holes in half of them.

Then we proceeded painting them black after sanding them down. While some were painting and sanding, we had another crew spray painting the Icee lids silver. After it all dried, we hot glued the Icee lids to the plywood, and installed the support struts. The wiring came next, as we attached the bulbs to the back panels with hot glue also. The backs and the fronts had to line up precisely, so it was the most time consuming part.

After we got them wired we assembled them on stage by attaching a piece of 1×3 to the back. We already had a sort of support grid of 2x4s along the back wall and attached the boxes to that to stand them up.

The total project cost about $7000. Had we bought the Elation fixtures, it would have been upwards of $100,000.
The rest of the design is a combo of a truss that we had laying around that we hung from an existing bar. That has 6 Lixada LED Movers on it (cheap Chinese $80 fixtures). The bar above it holds 5 Elation SixPar 300 LED cans. There are 13 Elation OptiTriPars that we used on the 2×4 frame for band backlights and blinder/beams.

The triple wide screen is a projection blend running out of ProPresenter 6, a TripleHead2Go, and 3 Epson 7K edge blended projectors.