I got to help pull off our December series, “Instalife” – Travis and I were put on stage design. Our goal: Create the best stage pieces yet while spending as little money as possible.

Personally, I am proud of what we came out with. In the center of the stage, we hung an Instagram logo and two signs on either side that spelled out our series title, “Instalife.” On the walls, we hung 12 blown up images of some of our students’ Instagrams.

Sometimes I think people think that big churches just spends ridiculous amounts of money on everything we do, when we can actually try to be as frugal as possible. We have little (and sometimes no) budget that we need to stick to. Because of that… we improvise.

This is one of the Instagrams that we hung up on the wall. Looks clean on the front right? While the front may look like a million dollars, tells a different story. To put this together, we just “screen-shot” the student’s Instagrams and had them blown up to poster size as Costco. Because Travis and I are so cheap, we are huge believers in scavenging and recycling. The backing is made up of materials that we either “borrowed” from other ministries or found around the office. We glued the picture onto a Styrofoam board and duct-taped sticks to the back for stability.

The Instagram logo? We used a projector to trace the design onto a piece of wood that we “stole” from college ministry. Luckily, we have some of artistic students that volunteered to paint in the design we traced out. Looked incredible!

For the finished look, we wanted everything to look like it was floating, so we used fishing line to hang all of the pieces. The Instagrams went up easy, but we were terrified that the Instagram logo was going to be too heavy and snap the line. The fact that it stayed up for both weekends really proves the power of prayer!

Does your ministry do stage design? Share a story of a stage design that you thought killed it!

Colton Harker is the Student Leadership Director at Saddleback HSM.  If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact him at coltonharker@gmail.com or on twitter at @ColtonHarker.