Shoestring Stage Design - Part 1

-designing creative worship environments on a tight budget

I work for a youth ministry doing technical production and don’t always get the largest budget with which to be creative. I have to justify for every penny I spend because sometimes, the ideas I have are a little more harebrained than one might normally come up with. The designs have to be more engaging than it would be for an older demographic because kids are bombarded with incredulous stage designs and production values. You can’t one up music videos, MTV or VH1 music award shows, Miss America pageants, Good Morning America or American Idol. Thankfully you don’t have to. No one expects anything from the church which is a good thing...and an incredibly sad one. So the only limitations you have are set by yourself and whoever governs your stage design. Once you set a certain level of design you’re going to have to keep it up in one way or another.

The best way I can tell you to keep up your level of design, is surround yourself with creative people, resources, and when you buy materials buy multipurpose. Design stuff with a future use in mind because one day instead of going out to buy a gaggle of one thing or another you’ll already have something you can either use in lieu of, or along the same lines of what you’re initially thinking. Also if it’s a disposable material...try and get as many uses out of it as possible. Either incorporate it into your next design to keep costs down, or use it soon after. These are some ways to keep an air of consistency throughout your designs.

In these next couple of blogs I’ll talk about my design process and how to create some cool stuff with what you have and a little help from home depot.

1. Substance abuse or looking good?

The age old question, form (looking good) over function, or do you design for the series topic (the substance)? This is the first thing that I start throwing against the wall like cooked spaghetti and if it sticks I go with it. This is all dependent on what you’re asked for. Sometimes you can come up with some incredibly creative elements that fit your theme, and other times you can’t touch it with a ten foot pole. If you’ve got a series on relationships, there is a plethora of material you could use that would be either inexpensive, edgy or laying around your house that you could use to knock it home visually to your audience. If you’re allowed, a bed in the center of your stage could give a bit of the forbidden allure to the topic at hand. I’m pretty sure everybody has a spare bed somewhere in the church that you could manage to wrangle up there. One church in Ohio built a large heart-shaped bed in the center of their stage. Whimsical, edgy and communicative. What I decided to do was create four foot 3D hearts out of corrugated plastic, some lumber and our existing LED lighting fixtures which gave me any amount of color options I wanted on stage. A 4ft x 8ft sheet of this plastic was $10, it took two per heart and I created two. Lumber add another $25. So i created unique staging elements with a theme for around $70.

I’ve been amazed at how often those outside the discipline of design assume that what designers do is decoration. Good design is problem solving.

— Jeffrey Veen

Not everything has to be with a theme though. Sometimes your creative layout can be with the way you stage your band, use your existing lighting, and maybe a few other pieces just to create a nice visual look. Ikea paper lanterns and bulb strands are an incredibly cheap, reusable and warm creative resource to give a homey, ‘cool’ look to your stage. You can vary your look too with different sized paper lanterns, and what I found is if you’ve got LED par cans just use the frame holder in the can, slip the paper lantern ring into it and viola you have a color changing paper lantern you can hang anywhere on your stage. I used these to create a homey ambience on the stage, but not necessarily adhering to a particular themed look.

Sit down with your team and decide if there is a particular creative element that will drive your series. It may be something small to accent your entire design that will make people stop and go wow. Sometimes even your theme or series can be lacking in the creative flow. This is a good time for you to make magic happen. Boost the creativity of the group by coming up with some crazy awesome stuff looks wise. Sure the theme may be lacking in creativity but that doesn’t mean you have to. 


to come...

• Projection is your friend.
• LIGHTS, action, camo.
• Where do I find materials???
• I need inspiration, HELP!
• My name is what?