Honesty - Moment of Truth - March 2013

01 Mar Honesty – Moment of Truth – March 2013

Posted at 12:29h in 2013, Environment, Honesty, Life App, Once by lisa 3 Comments

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Life App: Honesty – choosing to be truthful in whatever you say and do.
Theme: Moment of Truth
Date: March, 2013

Ideas We Brainstormed

This set design took many turns from the first time we talked about it. Even during the week we were putting it together, we changed gears, went shopping, and took things in a different direction. We knew we wanted to mimic the theme graphic from the 252 Basics large group visuals, but how to go about it (i.e.what materials/medium to use) was the big question. There were two elements that we knew we wanted and they stayed the same throughout the process:

A Photo Tex sticker that said “Can You Be Trusted?” from the base of the Theme Graphic
“Moment of Truth” letters enlarged on insulation foam and then carved and painted

We also knew we wanted to create clocks to match the graphic, but we weren’t sure the best way to do it. We wanted to save our budget and watch the amount of work it would take. As we brainstormed, we came up with the following ideas:

Use a hot knife to carve clocks/stems from insulation foam
Paint clocks/stems directly on the backdrop itself
Borrow real clocks from members of our church
Cut clocks/stems out of poster board

We knew whatever type of clock we used, we would be creating a circle outline about 1 inch thick. We did not plan to put numbers on the clocks, but we would cut hands for each one. As we thought through our options for the clocks themselves, we narrowed our options based on the following:

Carving clocks/stems and then painting them would take a tremendous amount of time and effort. We weren’t sure we had the time or manpower to pull that off this month.
Painting clocks directly on the backdrop would render the backdrop unusable for future use. In addition, it wouldn’t give us the 3-D element we love.
Borrowing clocks could be cool, but hanging them would be difficult especially since whatever we did would need to be removed each week for our student ministry to take over our space. Remember we share space with many other ministries throughout the week.
As a result, we decided to cut circles and stems out of brightly colored poster board… or so we thought!

5 Days Away and We Change it All!

The day I brought all of the poster board in to church and had planned to start cutting circles, my director and I began talking about the process. We knew that the poster board circles were the cheaper option and we knew that it would save us time because we didn’t need to paint, but we also knew they weren’t going to look great. Cutting circles by hand is not always clean and we were concerned that we were forfeiting quality. It also wasn’t 3-D and we really weren’t sold on the idea.

I mentioned that I saw pre-cut foam circle rings in the floral department of a local arts and crafts store. We decided that while it was crunch time and it would take a bit more effort because the foam would need to be painted, it would be worth it to invest in the foam circles. The time we would save cutting, we would use to paint the foam. In addition, it would give us the 3-D look we love and the set would have a clean, quality look.

Feeling this was the best option, I headed for the craft store, bought supplies, and we got to work. We were 5 days away from kicking off the Life App of Honesty. We crammed a ton of work into the next 3 days, but in the end it was worth it. This was one of my favorite sets we had done in a long time!

Process

We painted 10 insulation foam panels black as the backdrop for our set.
We had a Photo Tex sticker made that said “Can You Be Trusted?”
We enlarged the words “Moment of Truth” from the theme graphic and traced them onto insulation foam.
We cut them out using an x-acto knife. We knew we wanted sharp, straight edges like that in the theme graphic and a hot knife would not give us the clean look that the x-acto knife did.
We painted them a yellow/green color to match the graphic.
We painted various sizes of foam circle rings (3 colors-blue, orange and yellow/green).
We cut “stems” for the clocks out of the same foam that the circle rings were made out of.
We painted the stems along with some small pre-cut foam circles to match the colors of the clocks.
We cut and painted hands for each clock.
We pinned the pieces in place on the backdrop being careful not to overlap any of the panel seams. This way when we took our panels down each week, things could stay in place on each of the individual panels and we would not need to remove the clocks and other elements of the set.

A Set Transformed!

Because Easter was the last Sunday of this month, we decided to tweak our set just a bit to reflect what we were celebrating that day.

We took down the “Moment of Truth” letters.
We took down the Photo Tex Sticker.
We removed the hands from each clock.
We cut letters with the Cricut that said “Greatest Day in History!”
We opened worship with the song “Happy Day” and talked about how we were celebrating the “Greatest Day in History!”

It was fun to see how just a few small changes made such a big difference in the message we conveyed that day!