Mountains and Starships

Dane Styczynski‎ from Victory Church in Lancaster, PA brings us this cool look for their two campuses.

From Dane: Our broadcast campus has a taller ceiling and a little more width, so the mountains were designed a little larger to fill the dead space.

The mountains at one of our satellite campuses (we have six campuses) were scaled down and an extra LED piece was added since the center projection screen retracts into the ceiling.

The wooden members are 2x4s ripped into three strips (cost savings, but time intensive), but you could just as easily buy 2×2.
The LED adhesive wasn’t strong enough for a good bond to the wood surface, so we added bands of electrical tape all the way around the cross bars. We notched out a section of the tape to make sure we didn’t cover any of the LEDs. Since LED tape gets warm (especially trapped inside PEX tube) it is important to be well-secured. If the tape bubbles and gets close to the tube, it ruins the diffused/uniform lighting.

The LED was stopped short of the end of the cross bars to allow space for the connector.

The LED tape is SUPERNIGHT Waterproof RGB, selected because we’ve used it before.

A single screw held the cross bar on the vertical bar. The benefit was that they were easy to level when in place. The downside was that they were harder to keep level.

LED wiring was stapled to the back with 3/8″ staples (not the electrical tape as shown). Every other LED bar was wired in series so we could have alternating colors. 

We used 1″ white PEX and cut off one side for a width of 7/8″. It was just enough of a cut to allow the pipe to slip over the LED tape.

We chose to use electrical tape to secure the pipe to the cross bar at either end. It hides the dull spot where the connection is, and it is cheap and easy. We also used a couple finishing nails at an angle on longer sections to keep the PEX from bowing out. Be careful not to nail through your LEDs!

We then covered the open ends of the tube and wires with black gaff to control light spill and hide the wiring.

We designed the cross bars in set lengths (12″, 18″, 24″, 30″, 36″) and arranged them randomly, but so that we had relatively even coverage.

We had 5 versions and then varied how many we used based on the width of the stage at each campus.

Two LED “trees” were screwed to an 8′ stick of lumber that was painted black and the zip-tied (with much redundancy) to the lighting/scenic pipes at each campus. Command strips or small hooks would also work well.