Welcome back to episode 70 of the MOD scenes podcast. I’m really thrilled to chat with you today about creating a great stage backdrop for your church or your next concert or a really, whatever your next need is. We would love to chat with you about it. Uh, so today I want to actually profile a stage design I did back in 2012, so quite a few years ago at this point. I am a, I’m a stage design nerd. Um, I’ve done church stage designs for years. It’s really my passion and, uh, really what modsy is, was birthed out of a. and I want to, uh, I want to. I thought, you know, it’d be great to go over some of the older stuff we did that, uh, there was a building block on how we got to where we’re at with teens. Uh, and also was just really cool.

So today I’m going to be talking about a couple of church stage designs that I’ve done. Actually, probably just one. Uh, it was specifically for a concert that we did at Northland Church down in Orlando, Florida. Uh, this church stage design was kind of a meld of church stage design and a concert design because it was for a battle of the bands event. Uh, me and one of my great buddies, Mike Walker did a lot of the work on it. There’s a couple other phenomenal volunteers, altis as well, but Mike helped me with some of the programming and he was really the one who was like, yeah, you should really do that. Absolutely crazy set. So, um, I’m gonna so this is actually a lot of this information is on my personal blog, uh, that, that’s [inaudible] dot blogspot.com. So if you want to see a lot of really in depth the drawings and pictures and stuff like that, you can have a look there.
Um, again, this specific podcast is not going to be quite so tuned to state the backdrops with use of scenes, but some of the craziest stuff that we did that took a lot more work than the monsoons product. Um, so at least it will be a little bit entertaining. So here we go. So we’re going to dive in a. So this event was for, um, specifically for the battle of the bands at. I’m sorry it wasn’t 2012, it was in 2011. Um, it was for a battle of the bands at Northland Church for the student ministry department. So, um, I’m going to kind of do my best to describe the craziness that that was, what the set was. So, um, I had a, a relatively relatively reasonable sized budget for, for what was in front the time. Um, and so what I had is I had a thousand dollars to work with and I found a company in Orlando that had a bunch of masonry scaffolding for sale and I thought, you know, what trust looks really cool, but what if we just did silver scaffolding instead and put it everywhere. Uh, so we bought a bunch of this masonry scaffolding, horrible, horrible stuff. It was covered with, uh, with concrete and masonry, dirt, dust and grime and uh, particles and concrete like stuff. Uh, so we spent a solid two weeks, uh, hitting, hitting the scaffolding with hammers, grinding it away with angle grinders, brush wheels, desks. Uh, I managed to get shrapnel in my left leg, so if you’re ever doing an extra, you’ll see some cool shrapnel pieces in my left leg from that. That was fun.
Anyhow, it was crazy. So, uh, we initially started to, when I initially started to put together, um, put together the, uh, the scenic and started cleaning it off and whatnot. Our initial thought was that we’re going to spray paint everything like a metallic silver. So we tried that on one piece and actually didn’t work as well as we thought because it was so reflective, we couldn’t really color it really well. Uh, so we ended up doing a light gray, which worked a lot better. Uh, it caught the light but it wasn’t like too obtrusive. And whenever you, whenever you made it dark it was, it kind of disappeared a little bit. So that was pretty awesome. So a win for the gray color as opposed to go in with the silver that we planned on. Um, so I’m going to describe the visuals of this.
So I, I mentioned we had scaffolding, so we had a 40 foot wide stage by about 22 foot tall. The proceeding I’m opening for the stage was kind of a curved arch with the top of it being about 25 and the outer edges being somewhere around 19 foot, uh, maybe closer to 20 foot. Um, so we, uh, we took, took him about five sections of scaffolding which were three verticals high, so three frames high, uh, and it was masonry scaffolding and it was about seven foot tall, sir. I’m sorry, six foot tall. So that brought our total height to 18 foot on the church stage design scaffolding. Um, and we built it so that you could, like, you were looking at the frame, uh, and it was the walkthrough masonry scaffolding. So it Kinda was like a, uh, the shape of an end sort of. Um, but the cool thing about scaffolding, scaffolding is a structure, like we could actually hang stuff from it.

Uh, so we hung a couple of pipes on horizontal, horizontally up at the top and hung six studio spots evenly, evenly hung on those. And then down on the second and the first on the second row of, so that’s on the third row scaffolding up top. And it kind of bridged between a couple pieces. And then on the second row scaffolding we omitted the center piece, but on the outer two on either side we put in Mac two k washes and those were like our mid back light. Uh, we also had two gay washes and our main grids are main trust that was flown a. and then we had. So we had six MAC to gay washes up there, six map, two k profiles up there. And then down below that, like inside the nest of the bottom piece of scaffolding, we put a map two k and the center of each of those, uh, and the drum riser sat in the middle so we didn’t have one behind him.

And then we had a few more studios spots directly on the floor. Uh, and then between all these vertical scaffoldings we had these 15 foot trusses that had a, that interweaved a conventional par 56, a 300 watt narrow pars. And I’m color blocks. So it made for one heck of a one heck of a light show. So with all these lights, you know, with all these parties we had, even if you just dropped everything to just the bars, it was such a warm, beautiful glow and the two ks are just brilliantly bright anyways. Um, yeah. So. And then of course Mike Spades and George, two guys that worked at the church at that time helped me with a. It was, it was awesome. So, uh, like I said, you can see pictures are on the church stage design lights, a church lights.blogspot.com. Shows us a little bit about how we are working on it.

I’m like, just give me an idea how nuts this was. We added in some led led bars that were like pixel by pixel map. The led bars, uh, they’re like, one foot bars may have I think six or eight segments at each. Um, we were out. A university is on the sea. It was a party. It was awesome. We also did a ghetto, a ghetto Kabuki drop with a block and a with a, uh, like we did a rope that was tied off to a big, a big screen and we did a projection on that and then dropped it. And the real thing that made this stand out though a specifically was the lighting and the lighting programming. So we spent a, we spent about 34 hours on programming, so as you can imagine for a, for about an hour and a half show. It was incredible.

Uh, so this was the winners of the battle of the bands at journey or I am sorry, at Northland. Um, so as you can imagine, like we had the songs beforehand, we had four recordings and everything. So we mean we did it like we would have if I was doing a tour. It was, it was awesome. It was one of the most intricate things we’ve done in later iterations of that set. We actually went through and we projection, mapped each individual bar of the scaffolding, which was really incredible because you could make the scaffolding kind of glow and then change colors. And then more and fall apart and all this great stuff that was really awesome. Um, so as you can tell, it was very, very in depth church stage design, a total, I think there’s like a, there’s almost, there’s like 48 movers, which this was back in the day when, um, when a movers warrant the size of, you know, like a, a KFC bucket.

And they were, you know, the size of a, like a Fiat engine. They were ridiculous. So, um, you know, all the twoK , one, two ks are 2000 watt lamps. We had socos and all this craziness all over the place. I’m one of the other really cool things though with a, with that stage design is the backdrop we did behind the scaffolding. So the scaffolding act like as our primary focal point of behind that we, we made a backdrop out of a, a visqueen cheating. So a clear plastic sheeting and I should say frosting because it wasn’t quite clear, which was the church stage design intent. Um, and so it bounced light really well. It was really reflective. So at the bottom we did a couple of sidelights to shoot up that and then we did a six studio colors and they were oriented in a way that I could tilt them.

Uh, so they would, if they were, if they’re sitting at their homes, it’s 50 slash 50, it shoots straight up the drop and if they were like, if I put a tilt effect on them, they would move side to side on the drop, which gave us a lot of really great, uh, movement, uh, even behind that scaffolding. So there was a ton of depth that, uh, the other great thing, I like to get through a strobe on those and it just looked like there was lights everywhere when in fact there was only six lights. It’s just between each stroke hit, they were moving so much that it made it, it looked like there was twice as many fixtures. Uh, so that’s a great little, uh, hint and a thing you can use if you’re looking to create some more, uh, some more interest on your church stage design or on your stage backdrop if you’re looking to really push the lighting over the next level instead of doing like a, you know, just an led applied to do led uplights with some led movers mixed in like a Mac, one on one is a great option or there’s some really great, uh, Martin rush series fixtures or like glp x four s is great.

So you shoot those straight up the, the drop and those don’t even plan on those being like your wash. Those are more of your movement. You have, have a nice watch with your pars and then do the effects on those louvers and add those in on an opposing color. So let’s say if you have blues and whites on top and it gives you this just amazing, amazing contrast of color. Um, so yeah, so I hope this is a helpful podcasts, gives you a little bit of thought and, and an idea and into my design process and to specifically creating a really cool stage design for our church for a concert. So I would love to chat with you about how [inaudible] and my team can serve you well. We’re thrilled to be able to be the highest ranked and uh, I’m one of the best known a stage design companies in the country. So I would love to chat with you about how we can serve you best. Shoot me an email at Steven at [inaudible] dot com and we will chat soon and we will be happy to serve you and help you with your church stage design. Done.