Welcome to another thrilling episode of the Mod Scenes podcast. This is your host Steven, and I’m thrilled to talk to you today about, uh, stage backdrops. And today we’ll be talking specifically about stage backdrop it’s made of light bulbs. So, uh, me being a lighting geek, I thought it was really fitting that we did a talk on stage backdrops that included light bulbs, um, and uh, more, uh, lighting based, uh, backdrops. So, uh, let’s jump right in. So kind of how this came to, uh, came to pass is we’re actually tapping our home church timber Creek fellowship to set up a new stage design. So along with a, uh, pallet wood section, we’re also doing lunch of light bulbs. So, uh, these light bulbs, uh, are going to be, uh, controlled in groups, um, so that we can have them kind of flicker and what, and, uh, flicker and fade between, uh, different segments.
Uh, it gives it a little bit more, um, dynamic, a little bit more of a dynamic, uh, to the stage backdrop. So, uh, let’s, let’s chat through a couple of ways that we’ve, uh, found to maximize, uh, our impact while minimizing our costs. So, uh, if you’ve ever bought anything, uh, that deals with electrical or electronics, you will find that it costs way too much, uh, or if it doesn’t cost too much, it does cost more than the plan, at least. Uh, so, uh, with a light bulb set, a couple of things you can do to kind of minimize this cost and also kind of customize what you’re doing. So, uh, let’s start with the actual light bulbs themselves. So I found that one of the best place to buy light bulbs and really some quite unique light bulbs is from a thousand bulbs.com. So they’re a supplier based on a Dallas.
Uh, they have really good customer service and they’re a great, great company to work with. Uh, so anytime where you’re doing a light bulb type setup, we buy from them. Uh, so, uh, we actually, there’s, there’s a lot of different versions on there, but we normally use like a medium base, which is a standard light bulb. Uh, I believe it’s each 27 is the size, uh, but it’s a medium base light bulb. Uh, the light bulb we’re using for this project to timber Creek are a media base light bulb that, uh, is made for, uh, for exit lights. It is about eight inches long. Uh, and so it has a long and elongated filament, and it looks like a kind of like a test tube or a beaker. Uh, so it has a kind of cool look. Uh, so that was one of the things we wanted to try and do a little bit differently with this, this, uh, I think it’s gonna be really cool.
Uh, so for the, uh, the actual, the, the place where plugging in the light bulb, so the light bulb obviously has to be attached onto something like onto, has to be fed power somehow. Right. Uh, so for us, we decided to, uh, purchase, uh, clamp lights. We found that the best way to do this is to purchase clamp lights through Amazon. They have a brand called, uh, I think it’s simply the locks is the brand name, uh, light bulb of, uh, uh, clamp lights. Uh, and you can get those for pretty close to $5 each, uh, if you buy enough in bulk. So for the set we’re working on currently, we bought like 110 of them, I believe, or I’ll buy the dozen. So it was probably a hundred, maybe 96 or 110 or something like that, 108, maybe it was what it came out to.
Um, so we bought all these, uh, these lamp basis and we’re removing all the reflectors. So we won’t use the reflectors. We’ll just recycle those. Um, the, uh, so we looked at like just making the actual lamp basis, uh, but it’s actually ends up being more expensive that way, as opposed to just buying them already made. Uh, and then for our extensions, cause we use extension so that we can place the lights, obviously in multiple places. Uh, we use, uh, at a top court, we use a Christmas light court. Uh, we use, uh, SPT dash two, I believe, uh, which is a, and we use a black, uh, black out of top courts. So you can add as many outlets on it as you want. Uh, both male and female plugs, uh, within reason, obviously I have to stay under your amperage for the cable, which I believe is 10 amps for that cable.
Um, but we bought all that from a company called novelty lights. They’re based out of Denver and they’re really incredible. Uh, they typically ship same business day, which is, uh, pretty awesome. Uh, as you can tell, we like to surround ourselves with good people. So when we’re creating stage backdrops, we buy from good companies. Uh, let’s see. Uh, so we’ll use those and we’ll typically, uh, in the past we’ve done where we’ll do a single cable per light and we’ve taken it to like a Christmas light dimmer. And that way we can control tons and tons of lights. Uh, with this particular project, we were had a limited budget and we didn’t have the budget to do the Christmas light dimmers. So we decided to do, uh, just a standard, a couple of standard cheap, uh, four channel dimmer packs. Uh, so we’ve got, we bought, uh, a few of those that we’re going to have backstage.
And so out of the a hundred bytes, we’ll probably break them into eight different sections. Uh, and that way we can make, uh, put dimmer effects onto those sections, so that there’s a slight twinkle between, uh, the different sets. Um, and, uh, as we get this backdrop of light, one of the big things is to make sure the lights are dimmable. Uh, the dimmable lights, uh, really give you a much better look, uh, because it gives it, you can give it a lot warmer color, give it down to 30% or so it gives you really a nice, warm feel. Uh, another thing that we’ve found that works really well with, uh, with doing an, a, uh, a light backdrop is doing multiple different bulb types. So doing like some smaller balls and some larger balls and mixing them up, um, we always suggest to go with incandescent because although there are a few, uh, dimmable LEDs, they’re not, there’s not a lot, they’re normally quite expensive.
Uh, so we always suggest to go with a dimmable, uh, do a, uh, incandescent as it’s naturally dimmable, uh, for something like this. Um, let’s see what else. Uh, so we’ve in the past, we’ve done, uh, individual channels that have this Deming and when we’ve done that, it’s been really cool because we could actually go through and do nappy into a mapping to our individual lights. So within a three space, we can have it look like the lights, you know, come from the center out or, uh, or stuff like that, which is pretty cool. Um, which we’ve, uh, I’m not sure if we have enough wire for that, if we do, we’re going to do that this time as well, uh, wire at, at least to the ground. So if we have extra, uh, budget, at some point, we can buy some of those dimmers to do the Christmas light Denning, like we talked about.
Um, so yeah, so that’s a, that’s a part, a little part of how we’re doing, doing it for this project. Uh, also, uh, I think this house involves has a few of them, uh, of the, uh, the, uh, I call them, sorry, the, uh, the large bulbs you can get, uh, there’s a glass, uh, incandescent light bulb. That’s like 10 inches around. Oh my gosh, it looks incredible. So those are a cool, a cool thing to add in. If you can afford them, they’re like 30 bucks a piece, so they’re expensive, but they’re really cool. Um, another thing you can do is, uh, ear type light bulb. Those are really cool because they’ll shine light back up. Um, so it kind of directs the light. Uh, I think they even make something, have a mirror to back, uh, so you can either do it near the bottom or a mirror back so that as you’re, uh, as you’re setting them up, you can do some cool stuff with them.
Uh, let’s see what else. Um, and then, uh, dinning. So we used a for Deming. We used, uh, whenever we’ve done it in the past, when we’ve done and tried to have control of everything, we use the lighter Rama, uh, LOR 16 hundreds, sorry, 16 channel, Christmas, light, different pack. Uh, so those work to work together well, uh, to do not ever plug your laptop in, I’ve had one feed voltage into a network card and fry laptop before. So, uh, they’re not like super great. They’re kind of finicky, especially when you’re working with three-phase power for stage backdrops. Uh, but they’re 250 bucks for 16 channels. So it’s pretty hard to complain whenever the price is so low on the actual units themselves. So, um, so yeah, so I hope this is a helpful podcast about some options of creating with, uh, oh, you know what? I should talk about layout.
I’m sorry. I never talked about layout. So there’s a couple of different ways you can do layout. But what I like to do is I like to do a randomized layout when I’m doing light bulb, a light bulb stage backdrop. And the reason I do that is because it’s a lot more, uh, forgiving. If you mess up, you can also go through and do something that’s a lot more structured. So say like every two foot, you have a grid of them every two foot by two foot. Um, but you run into the issue of having, uh, having correct spacing. And the other thing is that spacing can, can change if you’re, uh, say you’re in a room there it’s windy and it could move, or if you have to work around specific, uh, say like, uh, you have to work around a pipe or something. We have to work around a movement in line. So you’re not hitting the moving line. You can pretty quickly get to a place where it’s a little bit more difficult to, uh, to hit your specific target location. So I do them randomly mostly, uh, and that particular design style. So that really warm feel works really well whenever you have a random, uh, layout.
Uh, also it, uh,
It, again, like I said, it it’s forgiving and you’re when you’re placing them, but it also looks really good, uh, for the people that are, uh, like for, if you’re doing a, uh, if you’re doing multiple different types of bulbs, it kind of helps, uh, communicate that, uh, that visual even more, it just kind of, uh, builds on that. So, uh, okay. Now I will, uh, work to end the podcast. So thank you again for tuning into the monsoons podcast. Uh, hope it’s been a very useful podcast for you about stage design and particularly stage backdrops uh, stage backdrops design with, uh, lights and light bulbs in particular.
Uh, if you have any questions as always feel free to reach out to us, we can be reached@modscenes.com. You can shoot us an email, uh, to sales at [inaudible] dot com or call us at (530) 723-6421. Uh, we’re really looking forward to serving you and thanks again for tuning into the Mod Scenes podcast.
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