Amplify Stage Design: 2015

Amplify stage design is always a chal­lenge. What can we cre­ate that is dif­fer­ent, ver­sa­tile, and that will add to the wor­ship expe­ri­ence? This year, we based the back wall of the stage design off some­one else’s design (yeah, all good design is mim­ic­ked right!), so credit for the falling cards idea goes to another church, who you can find on church​stagedesig​nideas​.com.

Falling Cards:

The falling cards are sim­ply just that — pieces of card­board made to look like they are falling. This sim­ple, yet rather time con­sum­ing idea is fairly straight for­ward. We chose a mate­r­ial that was light­weight and white on both sides — the ulti­mate decider for this was some­thing that was in stock and rea­son­ably priced. Our research found a com­pany that could pro­vide 2mm thick pieces of card­board, white on both sides and cut to size. The next step w

as to fig­ure out how many pieces were needed. By cre­at­ing a test sec­tion and using a bit of math, we fig­ured out that we would need 36 columns of 20 to fill the back wall.

Also, because we were putting up a big screen, we needed to take out 5 cards each from 16 of the columns, in order to leave us with enough blank space to place the screen. This meant we needed 640 cards in total. We ordered 700 pieces of 120mm x 240mm, 2mm thick card­board, white on both sides. Nylon was threaded through the cen­ter of the cards, and they were hot glued on the under­side at reg­u­lar inter­vals (240mm). They were then hung at reg­u­lar inter­vals (300mm) by tying them to a piece of rig­ging along the top of the stage. Because each card isn’t per­fectly bal­anced (and with the con­stant move­ment of the nylon), the cards hang at dif­fer­ent angles — giv­ing the falling cards look.

Screens:

Wide screens are good! Even wider screens… why not? We hired a screen that was 6m x 2m. Because of its width, we had two iden­ti­cal pro­jec­tors side-​by-​side and used a tool called “edge-​blending”. Sim­ply put: this elim­i­nates a vis­i­ble gap/​overlap from the two pro­jec­tors so that the final image looks like one. Our oper­a­tors used Pro­P­re­sen­ter from a lap­top to con­trol the lyrics, videos and graphics.

Light­ing:

We had 8x LED Col­orado Bat­ten 144s light­ing up the falling cards. This gave us the abil­ity to change the colour on the cards — we could make them a solid colour or a mix of colours. 6x LED Col­orado Zoom Tours lined the top of the screen and focussed towards the front of the stage.

These were mainly used as back­light­ing. How­ever, at one point we did have only these on, set to a thin beam, which looked pretty cool! There were another 4 of these com­ing in from the side. We then had 8x Chau­vet QSpot 560s, 4 hung above the stage and 4 on truss stands along the back. These are movers that allowed us to add move­ment and inter­est­ing pat­terns to the stage.

Finally, we had con­ven­tional light­ing for the stage wash and house lights. This was all pro­grammed and con­trolled via a Road Hog 3 light­ing console.
 

If you would like to recre­ate this back­drop in your Corps set­ting and need help, let us know and we can pro­vide you with links to our sup­pli­ers and answer any in depth ques­tions you might have!

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