03 Dec Service – All Hands On Deck – November 2015, Finished Product!
Life App: Service—lending a hand to help someone else.
Theme: All Hands on Deck
Date: November, 2015
Signing Off From the Observation Deck
We wrapped up the Life App of Service this past Sunday and are neck deep (not knee – neck) in constructing our December set. More on that tomorrow, but I thought I’d at least post photos of our finished product from November. All Hands On Deck was a blast (no pun intended)! We loved the theme and the kids enjoyed the Captain’s antics each week. You can read about the process we used to create our set here. Of course construction was not without it’s hiccups…
A Picture in My Head
In the movie Back to the Future, Doctor Emmett Brown describes a time when he had a picture in his head. He’s telling Marty McFly about when he got the idea for time travel and he says, “I was standing on the edge of my toilet hanging a clock, the porcelain was wet, I slipped, hit my head on the sink, and when I came to I had a revelation! A vision! A picture in my head! A picture of this! This is what makes time travel possible: the flux capacitor!” Doc Brown fortunately had the opportunity to see his vision (the picture in his head) become a reality as he turns a DeLorean into a time machine, complete with flux capacitor!
I would love to say that happens to me, but more often than not, the picture in my head never comes to fruition exactly the way I planned. November’s set was no different. When we brainstormed ideas for this set, we wanted the window of our observation deck to take up the entire width of our backdrop. We wanted the kids to feel as if they were sitting in the space ship and looking out into space! We had all of the best plans for it… until that is, we got in there and started building.
If we were to make the window the width of the stage, the control panel would have to be very short and low to the ground. We wanted to have chairs and have our host sitting at the control panel each week, so we decided to make it more proportional and made our window smaller. That made the backdrop a bit underwhelming.
We loved the scene our volunteer artist had painted on the backdrop, but the space-shuttle was a bit too flat and we wished it had more dimension once it was in place. Of course all of this happened the week we were “launching” the new series (wow – I’m full of puns today!), so there wasn’t much we could do at that point. All of the pieces had been cut and painted and we didn’t have the time or money to start over. So, we did the best we could. I added some silver tape to the floor of the stage to give the observation deck some definitive boundaries (simulating where the walls would be if we had the time and budget to make them).
A Portable Rocket Ship
Since I wasn’t thrilled with our set when it was all said and done, I decided to make a rocket ship like the one that was on the 252 Basics Pinterest board in the hopes of adding a WOW factor to the environment. It sat next to the stage and definitely was a hit. However, since we share our space with student ministry and everything has to come down each week, it took a beating. Still, it was fun and the portable factor worked. Here’s how we did that:
- I velcro-ed a 12×12 inch plant stand on wheels to the bottom trash can. This way we could wheel it in and out of the environment.
- Since the rocket was too tall to make it through the doors of our space each week, I velcro-ed the middle and top trash cans to each other so I could pull the top trash can and red cone off and move it separately.
- I had to take the wings/boosters that were on the bottom trash can off each week and re-tape them on each Sunday.
- The rocket ship sat in two pieces in our nursery each week since that is the only room at our church that is not a shared space. Like I said, it worked, but it took a beating and I was ready to not have to reassemble it anymore by the end of week 5!
We work in a semi-portable environment all of the time, so I am used to having to create things that can be moved, covered or “camouflaged.” You can read more about how we do that here, but how about you all? Do you have to move your set around throughout the week? How do you solve portable issues when creating and preparing your environments?
