Awards Show Set

By Alan Campbell

If you ever get into cutting Styrofoam, the Hot Wire Foam Factory products are the perfect tools and the company is great to work with, I highly recommend them. I created a stage set for an awards show in Texas. The set ended up being exactly as I had imagined it and the conference went great. I even received a standing ovation from the audience for the set. I tried to replicate some of the images from the conference brochure. One of the main elements was an electric guitar so…I made two eight-foot long electric guitars out of Styrofoam. Along with that I made 18 different musical notes/symbols that I hung from 10-foot tall poles situated on either side of the stage.

 It’s a little hard to take a photo of it so that you can see both the guitar and get the effect of the fiber optic lights that are used for the guitar strings. The yellow guitar is at the same point.

I cut these out of 4 x 8-foot styrofoam (the type you would use for insulation in your walls). Cutting these pieces out takes quite a bit of time. There’s one tool that can be used to cut the exterior portions, which works very slick and doesn’t take too much time, but the tool for the interior part takes an extremely steady hand and some real patience.