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Friday, April 03, 2020
Product Focus - Stage Deck
Prolyte: In the previous video of Stage Deck Systems , Product Manager, Eric Laanstra briefly introduces a series of Prolyte staging system. On this page, we will go through the product range in depth.
3 comments:
DJ L.
said...
Surprisingly, these are actually something that I used to work with all the time back in high school. We had a set of twelve of these 4x8 stage decks with a variety of legs. We often used various formations of these for things like assemblies in our gym, choir shows in our chapel and other small evens around campus. While they were not bad to work with, they definitely can be easier. One of the biggest issue with them is locking them together. For us, we had two ways of doing this. Either we used straps that we purchased from the manufacturer that went around the legs, or we used wood working C-Clamps to clamp the edges together. The issue comes when you have to crawl under to use those things. This doesn't work when the stage is only a foot or less tall. There should be a way to lock them in from the top.
I like these stage decks. They seem easy to use, install, and uninstall when needed. I think for a theatre purpose, it wouldn’t be the best situation, however, because the type of treatment on the surface does not look conducive to receiving paint treatments for floors which need specific looks, which is most of them. I think that here at Carnegie Mellon, we use these reusable platform stage decks for the seating platforms in the Wells. The seating banks in the Rauh are similar, but those are a carpet topped deck versus the coated top similar to these ones in this article. I think we used a stage deck similar to these for Lunar Gala. So that goes to show that these could potentially be used for a multi-use performance type of situation. For Lunar Gala we had many types of designs, so a floor that was basic and would go with anything was necessary. These could be good for concert use as well where a special floor treatment is not needed.
It seems as though we have reached a point in staging technologies that there almost can't be an ideal system. The Prolyte stage decks do, however, provide some nice features and different options depending on the application, since that will ultimately dictate the staging that will be used. First, their top line, which I was surprised to read was not waterproof. There is the acrylic line, but that comes at a reduced structural capacity, but would be waterproof since it doesn't contain organic materials. For the more basic application, they offer a birch ply version, although I wouldn't think there would be a market for unfinished plywood staging that has aluminum framing and legging mechanisms, but maybe this could slip more into the regional theatre market.
Their legging system is particularly interesting since it accepts both round and square tubing without changing much of anythings. This flexibility is something that could be valuable again in a more regional setting for scenery or risers of awkward height. I know we currently don't have a great way of creating custom supports for our riser decks, but being able to insert readily available and easy to cut box tube could solve this problem.
3 comments:
Surprisingly, these are actually something that I used to work with all the time back in high school. We had a set of twelve of these 4x8 stage decks with a variety of legs. We often used various formations of these for things like assemblies in our gym, choir shows in our chapel and other small evens around campus. While they were not bad to work with, they definitely can be easier. One of the biggest issue with them is locking them together. For us, we had two ways of doing this. Either we used straps that we purchased from the manufacturer that went around the legs, or we used wood working C-Clamps to clamp the edges together. The issue comes when you have to crawl under to use those things. This doesn't work when the stage is only a foot or less tall. There should be a way to lock them in from the top.
I like these stage decks. They seem easy to use, install, and uninstall when needed. I think for a theatre purpose, it wouldn’t be the best situation, however, because the type of treatment on the surface does not look conducive to receiving paint treatments for floors which need specific looks, which is most of them. I think that here at Carnegie Mellon, we use these reusable platform stage decks for the seating platforms in the Wells. The seating banks in the Rauh are similar, but those are a carpet topped deck versus the coated top similar to these ones in this article. I think we used a stage deck similar to these for Lunar Gala. So that goes to show that these could potentially be used for a multi-use performance type of situation. For Lunar Gala we had many types of designs, so a floor that was basic and would go with anything was necessary. These could be good for concert use as well where a special floor treatment is not needed.
It seems as though we have reached a point in staging technologies that there almost can't be an ideal system. The Prolyte stage decks do, however, provide some nice features and different options depending on the application, since that will ultimately dictate the staging that will be used. First, their top line, which I was surprised to read was not waterproof. There is the acrylic line, but that comes at a reduced structural capacity, but would be waterproof since it doesn't contain organic materials. For the more basic application, they offer a birch ply version, although I wouldn't think there would be a market for unfinished plywood staging that has aluminum framing and legging mechanisms, but maybe this could slip more into the regional theatre market.
Their legging system is particularly interesting since it accepts both round and square tubing without changing much of anythings. This flexibility is something that could be valuable again in a more regional setting for scenery or risers of awkward height. I know we currently don't have a great way of creating custom supports for our riser decks, but being able to insert readily available and easy to cut box tube could solve this problem.
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