Planked Wall

Tino Tines Castellanos from Victory Outreach Garden Grove in Garden Grove, CA brings us this pieced together wall.

From Tino: Our stage design has been the same for a few years. We originally had made 4 wooden frames and stapled a white cloth over it and simply hung them onto the back wall. We had some cheap rgb lights purchased off amazon and used a small 40 inch tv for our logo. I remember asking our youth leader Jonathan, “when was the last time the church updated their stage design.” After hearing him struggle to give me a solid answer, I got to work figuring out a way to make our stage look better without a budget.

I came across a video by worship leader hangouts on youtube explaining how they made their new stage design for that year. Their church change their stage design once a year. I figured we can do it to. I drew inspiration from their vertical blinds design and turned it horizontal. So i presented the idea to our leadership and got it approved. John and I started looking for scrap materials on Facebook market place, craigslist, even offerup.

Eventually, our idea started taking off, that we were given a budget of $500. I was excited. Since John works for a remodeling company. We were able to get some supplies donated by the company. They gave us 2 cans of white primer and 6 cans of white semi gloss paint to paint our blinds white. From our budget we spent about $100 to buy 15 6×10 flat lumber at our local hardware store. Some of the men from church came together with their tools from home and helped us cut the planks to fit our design. Our stage is 20 ft and 5 inches. We made some simple calculations and made a pattern using 6ft, 4ft, 3ft, 2ft and 1ft pieces. Then we layed our design flat on the ground until we were happy with the pattern.

To mount the planks to the back wall, we decided to use a compressed air nail gun. To add depth to our design, the smaller boards were nailed directly to the back wall while the larger planks were nailed on top of 2 inch blocks. With the remainder of our budget, we ordered a 4 pack of 90watt wash lights from stageright/monoprice. They came with dmx cables and power chords. We connected our dmx lights using a free computer software called sweetlight and used a usb dmx interface to program our scenes. For our displays, some members from our church donated their tvs and we mounted them onto the front stage wall. We use videopsalm as our presentation software as it has all the features we need and it is a free ooen source software. We simply bought an hdmi splitter to cast to both screens at the same time.

Once we completed our stage design, our church members were impressed saying, “wait am i at the right church?” They couldnt believe the big difference we achieved with 1 month of planning, 3 days of work, and $500. Eventually, our church was so excited about our stage, they started donating more. We currently have added 2 30watt moving heads also from stageright monoprice and plan to add 2 more. We also raised enough funds to purchase a drum shield from an old mobile church in LA. They also sold us a pair of rgba led bars. We hope our stage design encourages other churches to step out in faith and invest in your worship and creative ministry.