Welcome back to the monson podcast, this is episode. 14, we’re here to talk about stage. Backdrops are products specifically and how they serve. The church court prevents special dance and pretty much everything else concerts and what not in between so we create stage backdrops for for use in both rental and purchase application, the really simple great products, and if you haven’t seen her stuff before I’d love for you to visit our site at martins. Com there, you can see a lot about our products, a lot about our company, how we serve people incredibly well and how we built a company that is focused on leading leading within the modular scenic realm and really creating new products approach, the entire industry and create the industry that barely exists. So today, I have my beautiful wife, sarah joining usand, where to talk a little bit about the creation of on teens are how we started the company and just kind of dive into you, know our passion for stage backdrops and creating really good solutions to serve only churches, but also events and our corporate clients that we serve on a daily basis. You’re beautiful, by the way. Sorry sorry! So, if you don’t know me as much as I love, stage designer lighting design, I love, my wife even more so my apologies. If, if it’s a little bit too much, it’s great., how beautiful, you are that’s the next one purchase for about 10 years. I’ve worked in corporate lighting design, incorporated cedar type applications, I’ve done a lot of pharmaceutical drug launches pharmaceutical sales meeting stuff, like that in a lot of corporate events ranging from parties too full on keynote sessions with a tornado, sound effect in all kinds of ridiculous crazy. So we’re going to get into how the company started. So we started the company back in 2015, my crazy cousin 15. You help him with a stage design down in dallas. I did so with the group. Pleasure was really fun. It was my first large first larger-scale arena design, so I design seen it for the american airlines center for a large large corporate meeting event which I did and then we also did a secondary satellite room.
The end of the dallas stage backdrops convention center, which took up it’s three or four wings of the dallas convention center total there was like 35,000 people in attendance, so it’s pretty awesome lots and lots of scenic and ballrooms in large expo halls and stuff, so it was cool to be able to do not only lighting but scenic in it and a room that size having done lighting a turban that size I know how how cool is to be able to to jump in and dive into it, a space that big and really create something great in it. So we were able to do that. A design with him with my buddy out of dallas was really great, but in that we created we needed to create some custom pieces for, for that stage, design of creating a custom pieces. We really noticed we noticed the product that we created. It was a little bit different than maltese, but was very similar. It was a modular panel that built into into a larger stage backdrop, and when we noticed this could be a really good thing for churches. So shortly after that, we developed what you see is martins. Now we we custom cuts on a cnc cut, some some different patterns that I designed through a mixture of drawing and the racing wines and then creating new stuff from basing it off of off of one of those irons was based off of the rings from a cup on a napkin so and just kind of experimenting with the hot materials to different plastics high impact styrene, which is a thinner plastic, pretty durable plastic, but it burns kind of like gasoline super super toxic fumes. So that’s when we ended up removing from our our consideration utilized standard coroplast. A lot of people are familiar with that. A lot of churches, if use on stage, backdrops and passed one thing with that is again it’s flammable and it does produced toxic fumes is much less flammable was one of some other, a plastics company, specifically manufacturer in canada, actually customized a batch of coroplast with 4s with a material additive. They made a fire rated. So since then, we have we’ve actually fine tune out a little bit. Now. All of our materials are fire-rated, which obviously makes him super super safe to use in making a stage backdrop, but if you’re, using flammable materials, we can stage backdrop and it does get lit. However, that made the electrical fire candle being knocked over. What not, if that is, that material has a high spread rate, any type of wood or fabric that’s non treated, that is, that gets into the ceiling. It can immediately spread and it just becomes atrocious yeah and he just keeps going off fireworks. Oh yeah, we got some videos of that at some point, we’ll put a wheel built like a castle out of it and in light on fire, and let you see how I that doesn’t burn good times good times so fit in the biggest reason. I was really passionate about making sure our materials are fire. Rated is some research, I did for buddy jonathan when he runs a source for church stage, designs specifically for church backdrops on stage backdrops at church stage, design, ideas for really good resource. If you’re looking for ideas for something to do, whether it be something out of the box like our products, something custom which we can provide or if you’re looking to do a do-it-yourself set there a lot of really good options on their documenting wi-fi ratings in portage mi. You know it’s a good idea not to burn the place down.
Most people agree with that, but through my research, I found a lot of really good information on the station nightclub fire. It happened to oh gosh, 90 sometime in the 90s I believe late 90s i, don’t remember great white white, something there was a classic rock band and they brought with them pyro to the small club in rhode, island and shot the pyro pyro ignited some foam insulation in the building and that foam insulation allowed to spread of fire because it was not fire rated and the building was falling off with in four and a half minutes in that fire over a hundred people died, mini and most of which, from smoke inhalation mini the people, thought it was a for the first 15 first 15 between 15 seconds in 4 minutes, depending on what part of the room you were in people thought it was part of the show, the ceiling light on fire, one point of being stopped and and stop playing and that’s when most people realize that it was a big deal that building burnt completely to the ground, killing a hundred people and we had we as a church. Community I’ve been really really lucky that nothing like that’s ever happened because I’ve seen giant stage, that’s made of plywood and two-by-fours and pallet wood a covered in locker center in paints and whatnot and cloth and things that are in a cloth or michael doesn’t ever been fired, tested, I think it’s really god’s divine intervention that something really bad is it never happened and if I have any way to play play a part in that not happening. You know I’m, all for that, so about the the materials on a lot of people know that we use the fire rate of coroplast. In addition for a proline, seeing if we use the wii use a fire rated pvc that we also have we buy in batches with a chemical. The chemical fire rating in inside experimenting with some different ways to make stage backdrops and they were pretty funny.
Can you tell everybody about the one of the first winter we’re trying to build martinez for with the router the coroplast, with like a razor knife which is suitable only if you’re, making straight cuts and even if you’re, making straight cuts? If you’re not going like in the same line as the flute sick of you have to go across the fluids, it gets a little bit dicey, but the pattern he was trying think you were working on the crescent moon weren’t you, the crescent, moon witches of these big at curves, slow, gentle curves. So whenever you’re cutting with an exacto knife and cutting, but the thing is once you get to a flute, your nice wants to go perpendicular with a fluke it doesn’t want to go. It doesn’t want to cut cross on an angle. So pretty much anytime. You get a little bit of a job like a jagged edge unless you’re using a computer i, see and see where you can kind of control the material little bit more. So I can be done by hand if it’s nearly impossible to get nice smooth curves.
Even if you were like as good as you could get by hand like they were still so many inconsistencies panel to panel like if you cut three panels, I’ve got a hundred. Maybe two of them might be the same if you’re lucky in an effort to figure out if I could physically do it and effort to show how stubborn I continue to try doing it with with knives, we had a wood, cnc pattern cut, so essentially it was a giant wood block or wood panel. It was the same size as the motzing panel, with slits cut into it, with a cnc to a buddy of mine, cut slits into it with the wood, and so we we put the knife blade in the sweat and then run it through and still again. Consistency was not there and kindergarten craft project, but with knives. It was really bad and was there a why, don’t you tell so that that’s a little bit of a how we did with the exacto knife dad the router? This is a good, a router and I’m going to suspend it from the ceiling so that the cable will be like this, like free, like spinning thing from the ceiling and we’ll be able to like yeah I know since he’s working typical cnc router has a spinning a spinning bit him as that spins at cuts material right. Obviously, a computer controls the specific the specific the direction of where all of these pieces go pieces are going, so I wanted to go through and mentally do that which I am not as good as a computer if you haven’t ever known and turn it to shreds, it still wouldn’t have been exactly that. All of this is happening inside of our garage. After going to take a short break and we’re going to have second episode and finish off this. Thanks for joining us
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