Stage Designs

Spiked Grid

Zakk Rohrlack, Bart Cook, and Shaun Roland from Riverland Hills Baptist Church in Irmo, SC brings us this use of Mio tiles.

This stage design was used for their Disciple Now week for their student ministry.

They had seen some designs on CSDI using the Mio Culture ceiling tiles and knew they wanted to use them for their stage design. In their planning, they came up with the idea of using some negative space between the tiles and have their theme in 3D letters. Their budget for this project was $850.

They knew their pipe and drape behind stage was 30 ft wide by 16 ft high and they knew the ceiling tiles were 2 ft square. So they got into Photoshop and created a layout that would serve as their template in how to space their letters. Photoshop also helped them to decide to make their design 24ft wide by 12ft high.

They bought 1x3s and built frames in the shape of 4×8 sheets of black Foam Core that provided the negative space.

Then they spray painted the frames black and attached the foam core to the frames using staples and liquid nail. Once the foam core was in place, they laid out the Mio Culture tiles into a pattern that was random but could still fit the letters.
Once they had a pattern they liked, they stapled the tiles to the foam core.

The letters were made by a local sign shop and cut from 3/8 inch Gator Board. The letters laid a little flatter than they expected, so they took some left over 1/2 foam board, cut them into small rectangles blocks, stacked them, painted them black, then liquid nailed the blocks to the Foam Core and the letters. This gave them the height they needed off the surface and created some cool shadowing.

With everything attached and glued, it came time to hang everything. They used foot-long plant hangers and eye bolts to hang the top panel of each section from their lighting truss (There were 3 sections.)

Using eye bolts and small hooks, they attached the remaining frames. To help everything line up more, they zip-tied the middle section to the outer sections. This brought everything into alignment.

They ran 9 slim pars across the bottom to give them their up-light and used 4 Q washes to give them their down light.

Then they took some left over foam core and a few extra tiles and made a facade for the drum and piano riser. This helped bring some the design from behind the band to the stage.

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What Wood Jesus Do? Butterfly

One response to “Spiked Grid”

  1. Steven Hall says:

    Zakk,

    Great job! You team did an awesome job building this set and an even better job lighting it. Keep up the amazing work for the Kingdom of God. You rock!

    ,Steven

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