Star LED Prop Design
This was a prop for stages at all Menlo Church campuses during the Christmas series in 2018. Below are a few pictures of its use at the Menlo Park campus. It was designed to match Christmas Eve 2018 logo, which was in all promotions, printed material and graphics.
Photos of how it looked at San Jose and Saratoga campuses:
SJ Campus Saratoga Campus
The goal was to make the prop look as close to the light on the graphic below:
Below are pictures of how it was constructed:
Thin plywood was attached to steel legs (an amazing staff member welded them for us). I measured out the would-be center-point and using a makeshift protractor, drew dots where we would drill holes. It wasn't exact because we were trying to stick to using 3 rolls of LED tape per prop.
What it looked like after we drilled the holes.
We ran LED tape through the holes and looped it back through. We used gaff tape to cover pixels sort of randomly to make sure it wasn't just straight lines. Near the bottom, we covered certain pixels more consistently to create smaller rays of light, like in the logo. You can also see how we just looped the LED tape through the back and wired it all into a dimmable magnetic driver for the LEDs.
I added diffusion strips, purchased from Solid Apollo to give more of a ray/beam of light effect, rather than a pixelated effect. The diffusion strips were cut to length and glued on using clear silicone glue. We ended up making 10 of these to use across 7 campuses.
This is the first one that I built. Overall, they were pretty sturdy, the only issue we had was with how fragile the LED tape can be. Had to make a couple of repair solders after initially moving them, before properly attaching the power supply. Overall, I think the cost was around $200/prop.
