130 feet of material...

Stage design for Jesus' Kingdom: you want in?
We had a drama, based on the story of the rich young ruler. (Luke 18: 18-23). What it must have felt like when he arrived back home...

We do our set-up on Saturday mornings.
We arrive at the middle school at 8:00 a.m. and have bags packed and be out the door at 11:45 a.m.
Our team arrives at 8:00 with an idea, a sketch and materials. Sometimes we have 3 people working, other times it just me. I liken it to throwing spaghetti on the wall to see if it will stick. When we get there we have no idea if it will work or not. We have 3 hrs. and 45 minutes to throw it on the wall. Crawling over and around the band, and other teams (like drama this weekend).

We’ve started utilizing a lot of cloth. We use a 20 ft. ladder to throw fishing line over the various rods on the stage and attach gaffer’s hooks. The hanging materials are hung. This weekend alone we used approximately 130 feet of material. Gotta love the $1 a yard table at Walmart.
We have it measured and wrapped up on bolts.

I started on this team in January this year. I came with zero experience with stage design. Sometimes I feel like I am sharing meaningless details here; but each detail is a lesson learned the hard way in this designing process. If I have ever responded to one of your posting on set/stage design, and pestered you for details and more photos…that’s why.

I am always searching for set/stage designing elements. That is why I started a flickr creative elements design WAREHOUSE lab group. If you design (or you have a team that designs) set/stage design elements for your worship space, please encourage them to post pictures and details.

One of the things I am learning is that I try to take pictures on Saturday and look at them at home. This week for example, I noticed several things: The draping was really off, we forgot to add the candles, material was not covering the legs of the bar stool (on the left), the material wrapped around the papa-san wasn’t tucked in properly.
Things we were able to rectify this morning, when we got in. We ran out of time on Saturday and didn’t get to hang the plant (with fishing wire)

Sunday we arrived at 7:30. Finish up details, do full dress rehearsal run through. Practice transitions.
We have a pre-service mini-worship gathering at 9:15 for the leadership and teams (children’s ministry, connections team, etc) that are serving that weekend.
We have a breakfast bar at 10:00.
Then the auditorium doors open at 10:20 for our regular service.
Service ends at 12:00 and we break everything down, load it on the truck and out of the school by 1:00.

We are working towards having just general set/stage design packages. But, mostly we are designing something fresh each week.

Are you a mobile church? Give me your details and photos?

This is being submitted to the Creative Chaos on Thursdays at Ragamuffin Soul.