Stage Designs

Tube Drop

Biltmore Church Production Staff from Biltmore Church in Asheville, NC brings us this awesome tubed design.

From the team: This stage design was inspired by a PVC design but without the PVC pipe. We instead used clear plastic tubes (the same kind that is used for fluorescent tube covers) that we either left in 8′ lengths or cut in half. we tried painting white but did not like the look of it because it was too splotchy. Instead, we used white paper covering the tube from he inside.

After we covered the tubes, we put LED tape in the inside to give it a “light saber” look. On a side note, the adhesive on the tape does not work very well so we used other adhesives to make the LEDs hold to one side of the tube. The tubes are hung with fishing line at random heights and randomly connected to City Theatrical B24 LED drivers to control them from the lighting console. The LEDs are facing the house from the stage and makes the tubes have a more even glow with the diffusion from the paper covering.

The entire project cost around $650 for the tubes, LED tape, wire and connectors. The LED drivers were purchased separately for a previous project. We put together 80 tubes to be used across three of our campuses.

The project was not difficult just very time consuming to put together and hang so many tubes. The outcome is stunning and creates a very clean look on stage and gives the impression that the tubes are floating above the stage.

Allegiance Domed

31 responses to “Tube Drop”

  1. Bryce Phelan says:

    Love the idea! I was going to do something like this, but diffuse the led tape with white flagging tape. I love this idea though. Would you mind sharing where you got the clear tubing, and what size worked the best? Thanks!

    -Bryce

    • James Dager says:

      Bryce, we bought all the tubing from Lowes, and the inch and a half tubing is what worked best for our situation. Thanks!

  2. Sandra Boone says:

    Eric! You are awesome! Now and back in our days st Ridgecrest…..awesome! So thankful your creativity and ability and gifts have you st Biltmore.

  3. Abraham says:

    This is so cool! We might take some inspiration from this! Great job! What type of LED strips did you use?

  4. Cool,, it’s amazing projects and with little budget !

  5. Abraham A Aquino III says:

    So you covered the tube with regular white construction paper? Covered it from the inside? Can you elaborate? I’m sorry if I am bugging or being ignorant :\ I just really love this design! It’s inexpensive and gets the job done!

    • Eric Alexander says:

      We used some butcher paper type material. Long rolls. The rolls are only about 3 feet wide but about 100 yards long. So we cut them long ways and we able to get 3 or 4 wide.

  6. Taylor Shelton says:

    Did you guys dasiy chain the LED Tape or what did you do?

    • Eric Alexander says:

      We made it random. Most of them were a home run line back to the centrally located drivers and some were chained. That way we could randomly connected together at the driver. It worked out pretty well. We did that mainly so I could randomly split colors.

  7. Jon D says:

    What kind of projector did you use to pull of that aspect ratio?? Was it a standard projector just had to make sure the throw distance was wide enough and it cropped off the top and bottom for the wide screen effect?

    • The projector is just a Barco RLM-W8. We just mask the graphics. Our Comms team takes care of editing images specifically for that screen. We also use upper third lyrics from ProPresenter there as well. Nothing special just creative masking. If our video crew accidentally puts up a full screen video in center or an imag feed, you see the whole image bleeding onto everything behind the screen. But we usually don’t do that for obvious reasons.

      • Jon D says:

        Hey thanks for responding so promptly! So with ProPresenter you just set your output to the likes of the screen and the projector takes care of “cropping” out the space not being used? I am worried about bleed of negative space of the projector… where if the projector is set so that the width is covered isn’t there still black light being projected on the top and bottom of the screen? even if the graphic is designed to fit the screen?

        • Our comma department usually edits a graphic to fit in that space and at the right height/width. ProPresenter really doesn’t have to do much. To the software it’s just another slide…with a lot of black on the graphic to mask it. The projector has decent black levels so we don’t see any bleed over. Just between you and me (and anyone who is reading this). The graphic doesn’t actually fill the screen, 5e projector is too close to the screen so all of the graphics use black backgrounds so the congregation only sees what we want them to.

  8. Jon D says:

    Hey thanks for responding so promptly! So with ProPresenter you just set your output to the likes of the screen and the projector takes care of “cropping” out the space not being used? I am worried about bleed of negative space of the projector… where if the projector is set so that the width is covered isn’t there still black light being projected on the top and bottom of the screen? even if the graphic is designed to fit the screen?

  9. Ray Rowell says:

    Awesome design!! Can you post a link for the tubes you bought from Lowe’s? Thanks!!

  10. They also have 8′ versions.

  11. Clay says:

    Eric,
    how did u physically hook tubes to lighting controller? specifically how did u hide the wiring to the tubes that would be visible to audience?

    • Eric Alexander says:

      We ran our cables with the fishing line that was holding the tubes. If you had turned on some lights above the stage it looked like a random web of cables. Our black stage hides a lot of the mess over the stage.

      Controlling the tubes was done through 2 City Theatrical LED dimmer/drivers and then DMX to the Artnet Network (B24 or Qolorflex). The LED tape was cheap but the drivers were the main for to make it all work.

      If you have any other questions, please feel free to contact me again. Or email me directly ealexander@biltmorechurch.com

  12. Joey says:

    How did you get the LED tape to stick to the inside of the tube? More importantly, how did you get it to stick further in the tube where you can’t reach?

    • Joey, I’m sorry it took so long to get back to you. We used a few things. The adhesive on the back of the LED tape is nearly useless so we tried a glue gun and it didn’t last very long. The best option for us has been clear packing tape on most of our LED tape designs. If you can, measure out the paper you will use to insert inside the tube and then tape the LED tape inside the the paper then insert it back in the tube and then add some tape on top and bottom to hold it to the tube.

      I hope that helps.

  13. Love your idea!! I just don’t understand how you ran the wires for the LED strips. The ones on Amazon in the roll are great. But once you cut them in specific lengths, how to they get power?? Did you run it up the fishing line to the ceiling and connect them up there? I see the addition connectors that they show with the lights but I just can’t figure that one out. Thanks so much

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