Stage Designs

Revolutions

Kris Kircher from Waters Edge Church in Yorktown, VA brings us this awesome rounded design.

From Kris: We created this created this set back in November based on a design that Twin Cities Church had done. The whole set was made from 3/4” sheets of insulation foam from Lowes and conduit.

I started with creating a CAD drawing to work out how many sheets it would take to make the set. These photos are of our main campus, but it needed to also be replicated on our 3 other campuses as well. I created a large radius jig with some scrap 2×4’s and cut holes at set distances for each of the arcs. I then set a router in one of the holes and ran it across the foam. This gave me the most consistent and fast cuts. I had tried a hot wire foam cutter, but it was extremely slow and wouldn’t have been conducive to my install timeline.

Once all the pieces were cut out, I painted the foam with a semi gloss white paint to give it a nice reflective surface. I then layed them out on our stage and made straight cuts where the arcs overlapped so that I could get as seamless as a joint as possible. The joints were then glued together with foam safe CA as well as bamboo skewers that were superglued in for extra support. This doesn’t seem like it’d be very strong, but it worked really great. Anything that had a large gaps, I filled them in with some bondo, sanded it and repainted it.

To create the support structure behind the arcs, I milled out some 2×8 with channels for the conduit to sit in. I fortunately have access to a CNC, so that made this easy. You could create a small jig and route it out with a plunge router as well. This provided the perfect angles for the conduit to sit. Where the conduit intersected the foam, I ran course wood screws through and into the foam with some more of the foam safe CA. Then for good measure I went back with some spray foam and encapsulated the conduit to the arcs.

After it was all dry, I got a few people together to raise it up and ran some tie line from the set up to a few rigging points in the ceiling to keep it from tipping over.

I’m really happy with how this set came out and how well it translated over multiple series.

XO Need to Divide a Room?

5 responses to “Revolutions”

  1. Nicely done. We love foam!

  2. Logan Pittman says:

    What did you use for the conduit?

  3. Vinícius Sena says:

    What did you use to light them up?

    • Kris says:

      They were lit with a combination of large LED wash movers and some puck lights. Sometimes I would hit them with other movers to shine a gobo on them.

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