I have a busy, busy week ahead, so there’s not much time to go into detail, but here are a couple pics of what out set has looked like the past couple weeks. It comes down sunday and is replaced by the Illusions set that I designed for Buckhead Church last year. It feels nice to have a set that you designed but someone else built!
Please forgive me! This has been sitting in my drafts folder for like 4 weeks!
Alright, here is the current set. I have been playing around with this concept for a while (I am usually juggling about 15 different concepts at a time). We had a ton of 2×4x6 foam blocks left over from our ‘Playing God’ set a year and a half ago, most of which were already carved into this wave form for our ‘Judgement Call’ series last october. Continuing with the wave form factor, we layered the blocks on top of each other to for a sort of massive wave design on the xy axis and a semi-circle on the z. We side lit them with Mac 250 washes with wide lenses, so we got some really cool gradients as each side of the wave took a different color.
The other main element was all of the truss work. We used 8 sticks of 12″ box truss on stage, each with a coemar parlite inside for warming. In front of the proscenium, there were (2) 20′ segments that were raked back and towards the center of the stage and the other (2) 20′ segments made up the “v” truss in the center, which served as a major focal point, but had to fly out of the way so that our projector could project the message. Over the audience we had (3) 12′x12′ truss diamonds with chauvet LED pars inside the truss and spandex in the center. A lot of the punch of the warming came from a product that we had used in the past, but recently found a great distributor for – coroplast. It comes in 4×8 sheets, so we simply scored it on one side every foot and bent it around the truss. Very cool look for really cheap.
Check out some pics – let me know if you have any questions!
I’m off to ride the Cox Bike MS 150 tomorrow with my dad. The event is trying to raise $1 million for MS research, and my team (Coca-Cola) is trying for $100,000! It’s a two day event with about 65 miles of riding each day, but I can only do tomorrow since we have church sunday. I hope my quad holds up! I tweaked it a bit while playing softball last night! Pics to come of the current set!
Ok, so you can all stop freaking out and reminding me to blog now – I’m back, at least for tonight. What have you been doing for the last, oh, 4 months, you ask, that I would be away from blogging for so long. The answer is a lot and not much at the same time. It’s definitely been an interesting blend of busyness and recharge as the summer always is, but things seem more on the busyness curve right now. I have a couple things that I am going to try to blog about over the next week or so – mostly set stuff, but I thought I would catch you up on at least may-early august with this post. At church, we decided to go with a rather simple look for a while – you could call it a palette cleanser of sorts, after all the video and punch sets we did earlier in the year. I basically wanted to do something a little more based on my love of modern interior design, but mix in a more organic element as well, so I designed these asymmetrical panels that I painted a full stage vine/floral on. Here are a couple pics of it in action:
They were basically made of 2×2s with coroplast and muslin as the backing/diffusion. It was a bit of a tedious project, as most of mine seem to be, but overall I think it turned out nicely. It definitely set the stage well for the set that we just put up a couple weeks ago (more on that later).
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The other big event that I did earlier this summer was a camp in Panama City called Big Stuf. The theme for the summer was Broadcast, so after a creative meeting with their team and a bunch of other people from our parts I went to the drawing board and came up with 3 or 4 concepts that would work with the theme. From there, Jamie (BS Creative Director) and I sorta hammered out the final design. The idea was for it to be really bright with lots of saturation and depth. I’ll show some pics first and then explain a bit:
Like I said, we really wanted to have a lot of saturation, so I chose to use (10) Martin Mac 2k Washes and (12) Mac 700 Profile Spots. In addition, we used (93) Chauvet LED Rain 56s, (30) LED Rain 64s, and (52) Chauvet COLORstrip LED bars either on stage or over the audience – a lot of bang for the buck. I had so many fixtures, I completely filled up all 4 universes on the Hog II with Expansion wing that they rented for the summer. The stage had LEDs everywhere – in addition to (13) Samsung 1080p 40″ LCDs on a 40′ truss arch and (12) Samsung 1080p 50″ Plasmas that made up the center plasma wall (Brad Sitton and Brad Weston’s baby).
One of the things that we were really conscious of when designing the room was that we had to engage the whole room and not just create a stage experience (break through the “fourth wall” if you will). We did this by surrounding the screens with truss that was warmed with LEDs so the could turn any color and by hanging (2) 20′x30′ truss rectangles inside the soffets that were covered in spandex material and lit from the inside. We could totally change the whole color of the room from song to song or cue to cue.
It was a huge ordeal to put together in the 3 or 4 days we had to load in for the 10 week camp, but the interns were amazing and it all came together really well. (minus terrible power issues that we ran into – definitely a learning experience for all of us).
So there you go…you are officially caught up to August at least – I will try to post pics of our current set as soon as I get some quality ones.
I am watching a documentary on HBO about an elderly couple, both deaf all their lives, who get cochlear implants. I have no idea what it is called because the info says it is Little Miss Sunshine, but I have found myself drawn deep into the story of these people. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to not be able to hear, but even more so, what it must be like to live your whole life without hearing a sound only to suddenly be able to hear everything. The noise that we put so easily into the background is instantly all in the foreground all at the same time to the point where you can’t distinguish which sound you should be hearing.
I love what the father says when asked what the voice he hears sounds like – he says “I don’t know, how do I describe what green looks like.” There is absolutely no reference. They go home and test everything out. The light switches, rubbing their hands on the walls, their footsteps, tiptoeing down the hall, power tools, fans, car washes – everything that we take for granted they are immediately in tune with and amazed by.
It is also heart-wrenching, the pain that they go through with the frustration of not progressing quickly in being able to distinguish different noises. They usually revert to taking their receivers off to return to the “normalcy” of no sound rather than get used to the new sensations.
The daughter, who is narrating the story, said something that hit me hard…”As I watch my mother struggle with all these new sounds, I realize that part of learning how to hear must be learning how NOT to hear; how to tune in what’s relevant and tune out what you don’t need or what you just don’t want to hear….In the car, mom had already stuffed her $7,000 tool in the compartment next to her chewing gum.”
I realize that my life for the most part is sensory overload. It’s so loud that it is hard to distinguish what God is trying so patiently to speak into my life, that I often just give up and put His tool in the compartment next to the chewing gum. Then I get frustrated that I cannot hear only to realize that I’ve already discarded the only thing that can repair what is, in my case, a deaf heart, and turn it back on, wondering why I had turned it off in the first place. I am wired to be around people all the time – it gives me energy, but it’s so good for me to realize my need for quiet, to remind me to simplify and quiet the noise in my life.
What do you do to quiet the noise?
The next set is being built this week, but doesn’t go in until the first week of June. It’s much more simple than the last two have been, but still has loads of saturation, texture and depth. I will probably post more about the process this time around rather than just the final product.
Check out how Sony is choosing to advertise their new environmentally friendly attitude.
read more about it here…
So…my 4runner and I got in a little altercation with a Rav4 today – don’t worry no one was hurt, but it definitely caused a good bit of damage to both of our cars. It’s so frustrating…maybe even more so that when it happened about a year ago. Probably due to how much I LOVE my 4runner, but it should be patched up and in working order in no time. Drive was an amazing time, but it’s so hard to unpack when things like this get in the way…I can’t even think in coherent sentences! Agh…there goes my Tax Rebate check I was looking forward to!
Jeans that you are not supposed to wash for six (6) months…really cool or really gross?
check out the gallery before you vote…
I’m in waco for a couple days hanging out with some friends I haven’t seen in a long time. I’m excited because we are driving to Austin tonight and all I hear are amazing things. Not to mention that I get to hang out with my friend Lane who I also haven’t seen in forever. It’s been a nice break to get away and breathe for a bit. I got to go to an art class with my friend Anna yesterday. We were just going to talk while she painted, but they had an art critic come in a critique their work – I just think critics as a whole are a funny genre of people. I thought it was funny that he said he stopped painting in HIGH SCHOOL. How can you be a part of art and have no expression in it? Maybe that’s why everything comes out vicious. It was interesting watching the student’s reactions to him. I don’t know, I just thought it was funny. Horray for Austin!
