Welcome back to the Mod Scenes podcast. I’m thrilled to talk to you today about something a little bit different, uh, specifically about stage backdrops, but something outside of our product line. Uh, so occasionally we help our local church, uh, TimberCreek fellowship with their stage backdrop design, uh, and we’ve used lots of different products, uh, for creating great visuals for them. We’ve created, uh, custom activities we’ve, uh, used, uh, Keystone and Aegon panels for stage design. We’ve, uh, done custom cut pieces for, uh, other events. Uh, but this, uh, this next upcoming set, uh, we’re talking about using, um, a canvas diamond screen. What’s some custom connectors, uh, and a, um, an old anybody go to the goodie, um, a pallet, a pallet wall stage. So, um, many people who have used pallet wall before, um, it’s a really great, effective and low, low cost. Uh, look, uh, has a warm texture.
So it’s really, uh, there’s a lot of, uh, there’s a lot of positives to it. Uh, can save quite a bit of money doing it. Um, but one thing to keep in mind is it is not fire rated. Uh, so you have to take precautions while building it and while, uh, using it to make sure that obviously you don’t burn your building down, that’s a negative. Um, so, uh, let’s get into the safe, uh, to the, uh, stage backdrop for timber Creek and our design concept and what we’re going to try and build. So, uh, timber Creek is a, it’s a relatively, uh, well scale is all based on how you think about it. A relatively new church, I would say so not relatively small, but relatively new, um, church was started, uh, about a year ago. Um, so the, uh, the church, um, the church has, uh, somewhere in the neighborhood of seven to 800 members, uh, and has two services.
They run two services, Sunday mornings at eight 30 and 10 45, um, auditorium seats about 400. So as you can probably imagine it’s pretty tight. Um, and the stage is kind of in a corner. So they know the room is a giant square, uh, the stages in the corner on an angle. Um, and we have on that angle ball there, we have a 16 foot tall, uh, actually that 17 foot tall, dry wall wall that’s supported by steel studs. Um, and above that, we have Han a pipe with some Mac 3 0 1 washes we use for backlight and seen a Clyde eight. Uh, and there’s also some additional color blasts. We have a dozen color glass that we use for, uh, lighting the stage, uh, lighting the band, et cetera. Um, and then obviously front lights from goes in as far as port part is out front.
So, um, and then some sidelights with, um, uh, uh, some, uh, lation six par, three hundreds, so really nice and bright side lights. Awesome. Uh, okay, so jumping into it. So, uh, for this particular set, our goal is to create a nice warm stage backdrops. Uh, we’re going to use a pallet what, as I mentioned. So obviously Mazzi is we do quite a bit of shipping and receiving. So we’re saving up our pallets have been for a couple of weeks. Uh, so that’ll be a part portion of the, uh, pallets. Uh, also the building that, uh, timber Creek recently bought had, uh, about 200 pallets behind their stage. So, uh, I’m sorry, behind their building. So of those probably about half of them are not, uh, are in a shape that we could use. Some of them are rotted or tore up or just, uh, not gonna be the use for us.
Um, but yeah, so, um, with that, uh, we’re going to have a team go through with a circular stalls and so that we’ll cut off the stringers on the outer edges. Uh, so we’ll cut those off. So we don’t pull nails. Uh, and then in the center for the center, uh, most pallets have three stringers. So down that two down the edges and one down in the center, so we’ll cut off the two edges and then we’ll pull out the center nails. We’ll just kind of pry off that bar. Um, probably off that, um, slot, I should say, of the, uh, profit slot of the pallet. Uh, we’ll just bend over the nails cause they’re going to get put on to, uh, a scenic wall in a minute anyways. So, but we’ll do that and we’ll do about 200 pallets total. Uh, so there’s lots of cutting lots of, uh, pulling boards, uh, and we’re going to be our, our volunteer team is obviously going to help us.
We’re going to fill through this all together, uh, on a Saturday, uh, to our bill for this. Uh, so with that, okay. We, we mentioned we’re creating a warm look. So in addition to the pallet wood, we’re also including some incandescent lights. So we’re buying a bunch of, uh, clamp lights and using the, the, the lamp base. So the Liam, uh, the lamp socket, and we’re going to hang a lamp sockets randomly throughout the stage. So in the, from about eight foot up eight foot up to 17 foot, we’ll have randomly spaced, um, incandescent lamps, that’ll be on dimmers to be controlled, um, which will give us in a really nice warm feel, uh, with those we’ll put, um, with those we’ll put, uh, a specific ball that’s a T 10 a picture frame bulb it’s, uh, so it’s essentially typically used for music stand lights.
So it’s a really long elongated bulb has a really cool look. So we’re going to use about 70 of those spread out evenly throughout the area up top, and then at the bottom, we’re going to do our palette wood section. So we’re going to cut a curve on the pallet would, um, are going to cut a curb to match the pallet wood to, uh, so will you already use your OSB? So we’ll custom cut, um, the stage backdrops with, uh, wood, uh, like, uh, we’ll cut with, uh, our CNC. We’ll cut the wood with our CNC, uh, in a curve to we’re going to draw it off. We’ll have it all drawn out, drawn, drawn, loud, all drawn out. Uh, we’ll cut the wood to size with our CNC, take it up to the church. And we’ll, um, we’ll nail the pallet boards onto that OSB.
Uh, so there’s a couple of things that we’ll do, uh, it’ll make it so we can build a module. And if we have teams that want to work on it the week before they can, um, it’ll keep us from having to redo the dry wall afterwards. We’ll just put four screws in each, uh, each board at the studs, as opposed to having to put, uh, you know, 5,000 nails per, per board or whatever it works out to. It’s not 5,000, but, you know, quite a few, like probably two to 300 nails per board, going through the dry wall, it’ll break quickly ruin our dry wall. So instead we’re just going to use that curved mountain section to, uh, use the OSB to create that and then, and then screw it on once everything’s finished. Um, so yeah, so, uh, one other thing, and this is a key, I know a lot of churches just kind of skip because they don’t know any better.
Uh, we’re going to fire rate the entire thing. Uh, we’re going to put a fire retardant on the OSB, on the pallet wood on everything. So, uh, after we’re done cutting the pallet wood, before we nail it on, we’re going to spray down both the OSB and the, uh, both OSB and the, uh, pallet wood pieces. So spray it down with a, uh, a fire retard. Uh, there’s one that I really liked from a company in Dallas called fire stop. Um, you put it into a Hudson sprayer and you can just spray it directly on, um, so really great stuff. It’s, uh, it’s a, like a salt based, um, fire retardant, uh, which I really have no idea what that means, but I have tested it and it does work. So, um, so yeah, so that’s what we use to, to fire rate everything. So actually it probably doesn’t meet true fire rating standards.
However, it does keep it from burning, which is really our goal. We want to keep it as safe as possible. Well, obviously, uh, so we’ll go through and spray all that down before we assemble it. And then once it’s assembled, we’ll probably spray it again, honestly. Uh, and then we’ll put it on the wall. Uh, we’re going to use ColorBlast, uh, twelves colored glass, 12 tr so the toric version, uh, to light the wood, uh, we’ll use our math real ones for stage lighting and back lighting, as we normally do. We’ll use our song, our sidelines we’ll create a nice dynamic across that. Um, and we’ll, and then we’ll be adding in all those, uh, incandescents that we talked about though. Uh, picture lights, the, um, music stand and bulbs. So they’re clear like eight or 10 inch led, uh, incandescent bulb. Uh, and then, uh, currently our plan is to have those on four different revenue channels.
So we can kind of just have a really low resolution, like control of them. Uh, if I get lucky enough, I’m going to try and find a Christmas light controller, uh, to be able to do a little bit more, uh, in depth control. Uh, we have all the K we were enough cable to be able to do that. Um, so yeah, so, uh, I hope this is a helpful insight into, uh, how we’re creating a backdrop, uh, outside of our Mazzi its products, uh, obviously feel free, free, and welcome to, uh, copy our process and, uh, use it to serve your church. Uh, as much as we love creating products and serving the church, uh, uh, you know, selling proxy church, we’re here to serve you. So if that means giving you steps on how to create, um, create, uh, you know, stage backdrops without using our products, we’re perfectly okay with that.
Our goal is serve the church more than anything else. Um, so yeah, oh, a couple other, uh, hints and tips that, uh, that might, I might share about just creating anything pallet wall. Um, we found a couple of things that, uh, which you can see on my personal blog church, weitz.blogspot.com. Um, we’ve had a few things that really helped. So earlier we mentioned cutting, cutting off the stringers on the edges. Uh, you lose about four inches of board length, uh, but it’s worth it. It’s worth every second of it because you save so much time and just being able to cut off, cut down some of the stuff. Um, another thing is, uh, if you can get pallets from multiple locations, uh, it’s actually helpful because you get different aged hours, uh, which gives you a lot more, uh, a lot more variation in the type of boards you have.
Uh, that’s why we’re using some from the church and some from the Matson shop, uh, to kind of give it some variation. So it’s not just all really weathered panels. We want to have some that are weathered, some that are newer, uh, just gives it a little, really good, uh, warm and grain look like it looks a lot more interesting. Um, other thing is, uh, you don’t have to be super, uh, great thing with how wall is you don’t have to be super, um, detailed on your cuts or cuts can kind of be of, uh, they can be jagged or ugly or whatever, because it’s going to go against a bunch of other pieces that are jagged or ugly or whatever. So, uh, it makes life a little bit easier. Um, and then attaching the pallet. What the best thing that I found is to use a brat, either a finished nail or a Brad nailer.
Uh, I really like using, uh, a finish nailer, uh, or actually I really like using a Brad nailer because the staples hold a little bit better, but a lot of times I’ll use a finish nailer cause, uh, uh, the nails are a little bit cheaper. Um, and a lot of times that’s why I’ve had a, so using an air compressor with a brat or finished nail or, uh, is a really good step. It’ll make it easy to, to nail on the boards really quickly, as opposed to using, you know, a hammer and nails, uh, it’ll really speak your process. Um, again, it using the OSB to hold your product together is a really great way to do it because it saves your dry wall. Um, and it makes it easy to take out. So whenever you remove it, instead of having to pull off tons of boards off your wall, you remove four screws from the corners, pull your whole OSB out, and it can go right into the dumpster as opposed to having to, uh, you know, deconstruct everything.
Uh, yeah, so I hope that’s some helpful hints. If you’re looking for good places to get additional pallets, great places, our local lumber stores, uh, feed stores, you can find like a, like a local feed store. They’re typically pretty good. Uh, air conditioning places. I know this sounds kind of weird, but air conditioning, places that do a lot of business, they typically have crates that are, um, all of their panel, all of their air conditioners come in and they have, um, they’re not true pallets, but they’re like they use pallet wood. Uh, and typically nobody wants those. So people don’t get them from them. So that’s a good place. Um, other places are factories. Typically there’s a pact reason distribution centers. A lot of distribution centers they’ll send back their pallets. Uh, but factories typically they don’t, they’ll just, uh, depending on how big the factory is, you find a mid-sized factory or a manufacturing or customization place as a great, great place to start.
Um, tell ya. So I hope this is a helpful podcast on creating your next, uh, uh, pallet, what stage backdrops, uh, if there’s any way we can help you, don’t hesitate to let us know you can contact us on our website@modscenes.com. And if you’re looking for something off the shelf, that’s, uh, less of a, uh, less of a build, uh, get in touch with us. We’d be happy to set you up something, even if it’s not, uh, even if it’s not a, uh, uh, uh, fire Coroplast or, uh, like a fire rated plastic, uh, we can do woods and other composites that, uh, can make some really good lucks. So, uh, I hope this has been helpful. I’m looking forward to serving you in the future and providing stage backdrops.
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