“Courage to Stand,” successful Camporee event, result of design and fabrication collaboration

When more than 37,000 Seventh-day Adventist youth members converged in Oshkosh, WI this summer to attend the “Courage to Stand” International Camporee, they saw the cumulative efforts of Chicago Scenic’s design and fabrication team.

The Center for Youth Evangelism is led by Ron Whitehead, executive director, and Japhet De Oliveira, director. Together, they oversee the Camporee events. “The CYE team first contacted us in August 2008 to discuss some design ideas for the August 2009 production,” remembers Gary Heitz who was the senior project manager on this project.

The CYE team produces this six-day event – the largest youth event in the world - every five years and it attracts visitors from over 100 countries, De Oliveira explains. A key element in the CYE program is the enormous central stage which serves as the focal point for daily presentations and is the main stage for the event’s ongoing dramatic production. When members of the CYE team first met with Chicago Scenic, they wanted to discuss the set for “The Esther Drama” and hoped that CSSI could help them design it.

In stepped Tom Ryan, CSSI’s design manager, who met with the CYE team for several months to understand the story components and identify how the set could be designed to accommodate them. “We really needed to review all the different scenes they anticipated,” Ryan said, “in order to correctly design the set. We identified exit doors here and entranceways there, where stairs and storage needed to be - all the hidden details of a working set.

“Scenically, this was a simple project,” Ryan says. But the sheer size of the stage – 136 feet across, from side ramp to side ramp, and, including the 6-foot high stage and nearly 40 feet tall roof truss – presented some challenges. “Accommodating all of what the team wanted to do and what they could afford was an ongoing discussion,” Heitz added.

As the set design began to take shape, CYE members gradually realized that work they had hoped volunteers could do was too complex. At that time, they hired Chicago Scenic to build and paint the set.

That decision put a new strain on the budget but Heitz and Ryan worked diligently with CYE team members De Oliveira and Betty Whitehead, special projects coordinator, to devise creative solutions. First, Ryan created a series of renderings that the CYE team used to step up their fundraising efforts. “Then,” Heitz said, “we were able to suggest many different ways to value-engineer the set, modify their approach, and still deliver a product that met their needs.”

The completed structure that viewers saw on stage was the Palace of Xerxes, brought to life by a team of eight carpenters, on average, building the set for eight weeks and four Chicago Scenic artists who spent eight weeks painting the set. One of the most memorable touches on the palace was the six-foot-tall, eight-feet-wide lions that were scenically painted to appear three-dimensional.

As a final budget saving effort, Chicago Scenic sent a reduced number of on-site personnel, and the CYE team used volunteer labor onsite. In order to reduce shipping costs, the team used CYE semi-trailers to pick up the set components at Chicago Scenic’s warehouse and transport them to the Camporee site in Oshkosh.

Once this year’s Camporee ends, those same trailers will store the scenery for the next Camporee. Many of this year’s scenic elements were created with the 2014 production, “Daniel in the Lion’s Den”, in mind. “Preparing for the 2014 project was always uppermost in our minds,” De Oliveira said, “even when we were in the middle of preparing for 2009. We plan to work with Chicago Scenic again in 2014 to update and touch up the scenic elements from this year’s event and to build new props for 2014.”

Kanye West’s Chicago Theatre concert rewards Chicago Public School students

When Madison Square Garden, owners of Fuse TV and the Chicago Theatre, needed a bold new set for hip-hop artist Kanye West’s concert, they called on Chicago Scenic to provide it. In less than a week, Chicago Scenic’s team built the massive set, designed by John Yeck, which filled the Chicago Theatre’s stage.

Set components included five band platforms, two sets of gold stairs, two sets of white ones, and six gold columns. Kanye performed two concerts at the Chicago Theatre. The first one, held during the day, rewarded Chicago Public School students who had improved their grades and attendance. The evening concert was a benefit to support the Kanye West Foundation.

After the first concert, when Kanye decided he wanted to make a different stage entrance for the evening concert, CSSI’s onsite team went to work on a new staircase which was ready for the evening performance. Chicago Scenic last worked with Madison Square Garden and Fuse TV in December, providing the scenic elements for Chicago rock band Fall Out Boy.