I don’t know why I’ve called it Trinitron, I guess triangle = trinity, and when I was a kid my dad had a Trinitron TV?

Anyway, there was an event space (doubling also as a creative office), during few evenings, some people came over and had parties and such. So my boss requested a stage backdrop. Something “cool” and something rememberable, that we could eventually use for other events aswell.

One problem - it had to be cheap to build, and most importantly: easy to build and fabricate.

Features we wanted:

• Ease of fabrication and building
• Easy video mapping with projectors.
• LED strips mapped to 2D matrix so LEDs colors would follow whatever projector is beaming.
• Panels had to be white and reflective for projection.

I had few ideas, for example also taking semi transparent cloths, placing them behind each other, and use a projection mapping content for 3D effects. It works, but the projector had to be far away from the stage, in order to widen the projector’s beaming flustrum on the first line of sheets - to really sell the effect. Which wasn’t possible. Also, my boss wasn’t particularly fan of the idea.

Therefore, this is what I came up with this:

I chose a triangular shape because of the ease of fabrication. The triangles fit together, so the fabricators only had to do one piece that repeated itself, and then couple of outside pieces. Ease of fabrication and building - check!

To support the integrity of each piece, and eventually the whole backdrop, the triangles were made from plastic transparent PVC pipes. In which, LED strips were put into, and connected to other adjacent triangles. The PVC pipes were connected by simple L shaped connectors used in plumbing.

Here is a short video showing it in action - the only video left. The whole warehouse burned to the ground (we were all safe), photo is at the end of this post.

One of the more challenging aspects was the LED mapping to blend together with whatever content was projected from projector, but eventually we got it right. A surprising hiccup was, how many power supplies, and how many LED controllers we needed. There was entire rack of PSUs and controllers hidden behind the stage, that we cooled with off-the-shelf fans.

And here is its final form after a warehouse fire. We weren’t happy to say the least.