Theater Marquee

Design

My current theater project. Seen a few marquees built and being used by folks at the BackyardTheater.com forums. Rough draft the day I got this project bug.

Afterwards this looked a bit "westerny", no?

Tossed the idea out at the ByT folks and redesigned the marquee again:

Google Sketch-Up is VERY powerful

The feedback attained with the above image further refined the marquee design:

I've been at odds over the name on the marquee. Ciné-Tronn or Mega-Tronn?

Some more feedback gathering and a quickie Google Sketch-Up refinement and possibly the ultimate end design:

Very acceptable!

------------------------------------------------

Construction

I'm a "flys by the seat of his pants" kind of guy. Within 1 week of the above sketch, I bought the small wood pieces needed. I've got 99% of the tools needed to do the job so began cutting!

How much wood would a...

Nailed the pieces together to get the frame area for the backlight:

White backboard material

Cut the white backboard material to fit. Nailed it through the back. Time for a reflective material for whatever lights I want to use as a backlight. Originally I believed a couple of strands of Christmas lights would work however all 4 types of strands I've tried turned out to be very very dim. Needed more power! Heres the reflective material.

Reflective!

We have a good 10' of this aluminumy shiny shiny reflective underlayment leftover from installing our flooring in our house.


Hot glued the material to the inside of the backlight area

At this point I tried out 4 different kinds of Christmas lights. None looked to produce the amount of light I desired. So I looked back on ByT and found a reference to a post on someone creating custom backlit poster frames on AVSforum.com. (insert link)

Found these awesome LED lights availble for relatively cheap through eBay. Attempted to find these locally but their pricing was much much higher. Awaited 3 weeks (deliverly from China) and received 4 strands of 15' long LED Super Bright lights!

15' in a super small roll!

I've chopped up two power supplies (from who knows where!) in a futile attempt at powering on these strips. I've re-read the AVS thread and have decided to buy dedicated power supplies for these lights. Thats where this project is stopped at. There is a local (Southern California) "swap meet" held at a TRW parking lot that is specifically for electronics.