Stage Designs

Through the Trees

CJ Hatlevig from Roll Hill Church in El Dorado Hills, CA brings us this spooky forest.

This set was fairly inexpensive but took a ton of volunteer hours.

The whole set was a paper mache nightmare! They had all the newspapers and paint donated from people in the church. Then they bought chicken wire, flour, salt, expanding foam, and wood to do the rest. The highest tree was 18′ tall so they needed to use a 4x4x12 up the center of it to stabilize it.

For the branches they used 1×1’s to help hold the branch weight. The texture was expanding spray foam.

The rest was just man hours–around 1000 hours with all the volunteers and staff. The whole set took them around 2.5 weeks.

To add a special touch, they added a fully functional swing hanging from their catwalk but made it look like it was hanging from one of the branches.

The back of the whole set is aluminum screening common in sets on CSDI.

Hanging Wood Walls I Beams

6 responses to “Through the Trees”

  1. Brandon says:

    Can we get some details on what they did to the aluminum screening. It looks way different/ cooler than a lot that have been posted.

  2. Tyler Herron says:

    Oh my.

    That’s intense.

    I love it.

    -Tyler

  3. Ryan Spencer says:

    Wow! This looks amazing! Can you go into more detail about the back aluminum screening? It almost looks like crazy shag carpet on a wall.

    Ryan

    • Tyler Herron says:

      The typical method used is to get the large rolls of aluminum screening from Home Depot or Lowes. Then you roll it all out and crumple it up like a big paper ball. After that you stretch it all back up again and hang. You can stretch it out almost flat to give a little bit of texture, or you can just stretch it out partially to give a fuller texture.

      Also, what I think they may have done, instead of crumpling it up into one giant ball, you can crumple up sections of it horizontally first, then vertically. I think that gives it a more compacted look. I don’t know if that makes sense or not. Basically just squeeze it into a tube like shape, then crumple it vertically. Stretch and hang.

      There are quite a lot of ways to get that texture, which is why it’s so cool. Each design using it will be unique!

      -Tyler

  4. kelsey says:

    Did you run into ant issues with fire code for the trees? If you fire retarded them, what did you use?

  5. Laura Reed says:

    Where did you get the expanding foam from? How much total did it cost to make this set?

Leave a Reply to Tyler Herron Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.