GIG LOG (KIND OF): 16 PART LIGHT INSTALL FOR A REHEARSAL DINNER?! | [TUTORIAL] How To Spritzer Stars

This might be the favorite star one I've ever done. Hopefully the door's unlocked. It is! We're here at Legacy Stables. We have stars and pin spots for rehearsal dinner tonight. And we might swing over to Graylin and check out what they're doing as well. We've got a lot of weddings, a lot of events going on today for the weekend. It's going to be crazy. We have a giant production wedding out at Grayland Estates that they're setting up for today. They have like 200 feet of pipe and drape, as well as audio in a lot of different rooms, ceremony, movers, all that fun stuff. We're doing the rehearsal there today. We've got to come back at midnight, pick all this up, and then I'm going with Blake to do Watauga's prom. That is probably what you guys have already seen clips of. We're going to go do that prom tomorrow. Four 21-inch subs. Speakers, outfills, movers. There's a couple other weddings going on. What's up? There's a couple other weddings going on tomorrow as well as on Sunday. Blake is doing a wedding with Carla and Carla is going to be our Spanish MC. So that's exciting. We got totes on totes of spritzers. Spritzers, LED stars, whatever you want to call them. Larry's super strong. Strong. Pin spots, ladder, some tools, poles. That's what you need to do this. And then we got to get this little ramp over here or do they have the other ramp? I got to get the ramp. The teeter-totter ramp. And, and, and now turn this way and straight. All right. So like I said, we're doing LED stars and pin spotting. What we do is we go up in the ceiling and we'll show more of it, but we're going to use magnets and attach a bunch of these LED stars. We'll run power over to there. This is an expansion off the Christmas side of the company. So all these we normally hang outside, but we also can hang them inside for weddings and events. And then we got some Chauvet pin spots. We also have the both lighting G-pins. Even Larry, even Liz. You said action! Shit. All right, so um... We're filming this both for y'all and for our own team. So we have some documentation and things. This is a little side note, but like my YouTube channel and stuff, our team actually uses a lot of it for our operations side of things, like to train people on. So little plug, if you're starting a company, you can use a lot of my content to educate your people. Check it out. But these are the spritzer stars. Okay, cool. And we have a lot of these. They come in three different sizes. They come in 24s, 12s, 16s. We use these in my holiday light company, Greensboro Holiday Lights. But you can buy these online variety of different people you can buy them from, they cost 20 30 bucks a piece roughly But if you use them like we do all year round for both this and that we can, they're they're wonderful So these will have a twinkle glow, we'll plug them in and show you but I'm gonna be showing how to mount these So the first thing is to fluff the star as you can see from this one. We've already fluffed it So the way I do it fast is you hold it from the bottom and we just flip these down we want to build like a row of four or five or six it really doesn't matter which one you're grabbing but you're literally just building in reverse a star. I mean trying to make a ball basically with all these pegs that come out and I have got pretty quick over the years doing this but you're basically looking for gaps and just kind of filling them in as you go. And you'd rather have more sticking up than less, so that way it looks really full. A lot of my guys get lazy and they don't stick a lot coming down this way, so it'll look more like a half ball when it's in the tree, and then I get callbacks. But today we're doing it for a rehearsal dinner, so we really want to make sure that they look good because they're not just going to be up in a tree and people driving by for a holiday light show. So as you can see, I'm down to the end now, just kind of fluffing it out, and then I'll grab it by the hook. And just kind of see where I'm missing some gaps and it might need filled in. And I'll do that also before we actually put it up in the air. You can see I actually did a little too many up on the upside. And then when we're, it depends on what we're doing, but for Christmas lights, we would have like a ladder and we'd hang them on the ladder. You don't want to set these down on the ground because it will squash that bottom. If you have to, you can set it down on the ground and then when you go to hang it, you know, just fluff it out. But I like to just hang them on the back of the chair or something. That way they're ready to go. This room specifically, we have a lot of metal items to hang from, which is always wonderful. We have metal beams, metal duct work. And what we're going to be using is a click it, click, click magnet system. These are worth their weight in gold. They are expensive, but they're worth their weight in gold if you do anything with ceilings. So these little magnets right here can hold 10 to 20 pounds, I think 30 pounds max each. These are kind of the smaller ones. I have some bigger ones as well. These ones will hold up to 30 pounds. I think these ones are 20. But this little attachment right here is the the thing that comes with these. If you buy the kit, I'll link them on Amazon. Like I said, click click, they are really expensive. It's kind of offensive. I mean they're not cheap, like I think 10 or 20 of these is like 200 bucks. But the way this works is this will go on that extension pole right there, we'll show that in a second. It's just a standard painter pole attachment on the bottom. And the way this works is this magnet is designed so that you can stick it in here. ready and then you have your thing hanging off the side here and then you stick it on the ceiling and then you can pull it off so it just leaves it up there and this just hangs and then at the end of the night when you need to take them down that's what this little corkscrew is for you go up there and pull the corkscrew pull it off and now when you pull it off the ceiling it doesn't come crashing down on you. Not to say we haven't been on a rush for some events and just kind of went through and ripped them down real quick but that's how you break stuff. Obviously we're doing it in a ceiling inside and I want to have varying heights and all that. So we have a variety of these wires in here and it is a tangled mess. It's just the kind of the name of the game with these. If you've got a better system list it down below but this is kind of they come apart pretty easily. We have both just some standard safety cables. You guys probably have them if you bought movers or anything in the past. Really what happens is these magnets all get attached together in the totes but these are adjustable length so if you pull down on this little tab here you can adjust the length of this anywhere along the ways to make different heights. Secondary challenge to this when you're When you're talking about heights. It'd be beautiful if the ceiling was just nice and flat, you could set all your heights. This ceiling comes down and goes up on both sides. Roughly between each beam is about a foot from what I've experienced putting these up here. We're going to go through and start hanging some of these and get them laid out. And if we come over here, we've done, this is Legacy Stables, we do it all the time. This is probably the 10th or 20th time we've done this design. But we have a full rendering of what this looks like, the beams that are in the ceiling, the center chandelier that exist, and where all the stars go to make it very easy for anybody that might be coming to install these in the future if it's not myself. Make sure I can hit the beams in the ceiling and then we'll tighten these down. So this is the pro tip I like to set my distances before. So like I'm doing a symmetrical pattern so like for this wire I'll do a full length a half length and then maybe a quarter length or just use a safety cable and then like my four center small ones i'll make sure they're all the same distance before i go on and larry's getting my large ones done right now and i think those are going to be hung at a medium height so i'm going to try this i like to place the big ones first and then kind of fill in the centers and i also like to start in the middle first because this is my highest point in the ceiling So I can get close to the ceiling all day long, but this is kind of going to dictate how low I can go. See, this is what happens when people just tear them down. The magnets start to break. There's another DJ here today. Got some JBLs. I haven't seen the JBL PRX 800s in a minute. We've been so into LD and RCF lately. Is JBL making a comeback in the speaker world after DJX? Comment down below, tell me. They sound good though. Honestly, I forgot how good they sound. I've set this up. Where I put the magnet in this is a broken one but it's actually still functional because the steel plate is what holds it. You can actually see the inside this is how it works. So the the center here holds all the weight so the bottom being broken is not a problem. So I've adjusted this and now it's on a chair here and what I'll do is I'll fish this through to the other side and then when I go to lift it you want to lift it this way so that way it doesn't slip off. And now you're ready to hang it in the ceiling. So all we're going to do is look for the beam and we're going We're going to stick it right up onto the ceiling where I want to put it. And there you go. You might be wondering what we're doing with this power cord laying here. We'll get to that. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna make a custom extension cord, and we're gonna stick these up in the ceiling with magnets. It's all magnets. For the big ones, I like to do the big ones first to set my kind of like heights. We're gonna do mediums now, and I'm gonna try a full length, and I'm going one beam out. So it should be a little more than double the height down, but I wanna make sure it's not too low as well. So we're gonna start there, and then we'll fill in the smalls. And the smalls will probably do full length in the middle here as well as on the outer perimeter we'll probably do somewhere around full length in the middle but we're going to play around and see. We're going to start at full length and hang one and see if I like the heights in comparison to the bigs and then we'll move on from there. So because I do want a variable in height I don't want them all in the same plane so that way when you look in you can see the variable and the heights between all of them. Now we have the fun part of these are lower beams. And now I'm trying to make, cause I'm doing a diamond here with these four, I have to stick one to that and I got to stick one to that upper beam, but I need the heights to match the outer side. So that way they're all on the same plane. So this is where some trial and error comes in. I think I can put just a safety cable here and then based on the roof of the height from prior experience, probably a full extension with a safety cable will get me the same height over here too. So we're gonna try that. I don't even know if I can stick this. Oh, I need to be out like here. That works. It looks, it's close enough. We'll take it. Sometimes you gotta finesse the wires a little bit to get them up through there. You might have saw I got caught, the cable was like underneath of it. This takes a little magic finessing. Allright we need to go out here. So we just went to stick the one over there and I realized I don't have duct work over there. So where I put this one is directly on that white drywall piece, which obviously is not magnetic. Um, so we need to take this down and move it so you guys can actually see how I'm going to use this to Grab it and take it down and this does take a good eye Honestly good eye and you can take it down pretty easily and now we got to just put it back in the uh In the magnet holder, so it's on that corkscrew Take it off put it back in our magnet or in the sticker part and then we're going to match it on the other side It needs to go right here instead and just like that We moved it and I think height wise I was already looking this one's a little too low now So we're going to have to raise that one up, so we got to take that one down too. There you go, got it. That is a lot harder to do than it looks. You got to have an eye for it and some steady hands. So and again, I'm going to set it right back down on the chair because this one is a lot longer to get set up. So I'm thinking about a foot, so about that. Adjust that and now we'll go put it back up and see what we think. This is a part of the stars. Make sure you have plenty of time to get this stuff set up. This doesn't start until I think seven tonight. We got here at 11. We got plenty of time. Okay, we're on the smalls. Where's my smalls, Larry? This is more for our people because we've had these now for, I think, four or five years, and we use them outdoors for Christmas lights. So these things get used and abused. Water is a problem, ice, all that. We have certain ones that they stop working. So this is what, we always test them before we hang them. They should be this bright, nice and bright. And what can go wrong is either the actual light goes wrong or this power inverter. And you can unscrew this and change it out. I'll show you this one right here we found doesn't work well. As you can see, it is very dim and some of the LEDs aren't even working. So we're going to troubleshoot it right here on the spot. I'm going to take this power inverter I know that works and see if it will work. And we'll swap it to the other one too. This is how you troubleshoot stuff, so this bad inverter, potentially, we're also going to put it on the other one and see if it's good or bad as well. Um, so we plug it in here, these are one-way connections, just turn them, okay, we don't have to actually screw it on, and it is still dim, so I'm going to basically say that it's more than likely the actual light itself, but to verify that, this is the power inverter from the one that wasn't working, we're going to plug it into the one that we know the lights do work, because these power inverters are nice to have, because they do go out as well. Um, it's like a half moon thing. Okay. And as you can see, it still works. So, power inverters are good. The lights are bad. So, we're going to throw those in the garbage. There's no point in keeping them. And move on to the next one. There you go. Troubleshooting. Now, I'm going to explain to you guys how we make extension cords. This right here is called SP1 wire, if I drop it. This is SP1 wire. You can buy them in big-ass spools. This is a 250 spool. We have 500-foot spools. But, basically, it's like lamp cord. It really is. It's glorified lamp cord, but you can power a bunch of LED fixtures. We use this in holiday lights all the time, and you can basically cut extension cords to exactly the length that you need for your events, and you can put inline females to plug in all these stars really easily. So that's what we're going to do is we're going to build a custom extension cord to power all these stars back to the power outlet, and we're going to use the same magnets. To hang the cords in the ceiling to get them out of the way. How do you get power though? You have these. These are SP1 female and male connectors. So the way this works, I'm gonna open one up. You slide this top off and this one has a wire in it because we reuse these over here. Helps if I twist it the right way. We'll show you in a second, close up. The way this works is there's two vampire kind of clips in there that tap into the wire to get the positive and negative or the neutral and the hot wire that it needs. One side of the male is open and one side is closed. So what you do to start this, and we're going to start it anyways, there's one thing you have to pay attention to. The wire itself, one side is smooth, one side has ribs. You always want the ribs to go to the lettering on the plug. See how one side has no lettering, one side does? That's how you keep all your hots and neutrals on the same side. So I'm going to put that in with the ribs. You just put it into the slot, press it over the edge, and then you just slide the cover on. And that's how a male works. Now, you obviously don't want to put another male on this because that's making a suicide cord. So there is a little bit of technicalities you've got to get to this, but you're 100% able to do this for temporary installs without an electrician's anything. This is basically considered a temporary install. These are the females. Females are very much the same. Lettering on one side, no lettering on the other side. Keep them in the same orientation, except what you can do is you can actually pull this notch out. And now this becomes a inline plug that you can put power right in the middle. Again, one side is ribbed, so it's got little lines and a texture to it. And one side is smooth. You want the rib side on the side with the letters. So I'm going to put it in here with the rib side to the letters. Press it in. And then you want to slide the plug on. This is an inline. So the side with a notch is only meant to hold the wire. This side is meant to hold the wire and the notch on the top. So you just slide it on. And this does take a lot of force. Or, like I said, you can grab your... Handy dandy snips and get a little bit of an angle of some pressure and slide on. So what we're going to do is we're going to build an extension cord to start our run and that'll be basically the temporary one. And then we'll actually start plugging these in and making sure you want to make sure you have a lot of spacing with your wires between Because when we go to put this up in the thing you're gonna have some droops and stuff but it's all gonna blend into the ceiling and For anyone that is a little bit of perfectionist. Yes. They do make these cords in black. They do make black cords Again, I run a holiday light company, so I have a buttload of this laying around and it's just easier to use it, honestly, than trying to get specific black cords to use for these things. And the cords that come with them are also green. It's hard to tell, but this is also a green cord. It's more of a darker green. So there's no point in trying to put black if it's already going to be green. When the lights are off, you won't even notice. So one side note is also don't ever plug this into the wall and then go to cut the wire. It won't kill you, but you will definitely see a spark. I also forgot to mention, these are little mini snips. These are super nice. You can use them to cut wires, to pop out those ends. And also some of these get really tight when you go to slide them on. And you can use this as like a little bit of a lever tool to push that on. They sell a specific special tool, but it's not necessary. And now we can plug in the star behind me and we got power. So what we'll do is we'll... We'll come back after I get them all done and what we'll do is we'll like zip tie all this together to a magnet and we'll stick this in the ceiling and then that's pretty much the final kind of steps. But now we continue on to the next one. True. Do you want to hand me the one behind you? Why would you do that? It's time to rock around, to rock around, to rock around, it's straight to... We're almost done. Carla unplugged it because that was the end clip so I had to cut the wire now. Um, these spools are already pre, I was telling Carla, they're pre-terminated, so you don't have to worry about, like, when you're, you can run live wire through the spool, but when you go to cut it, shut off the power. Um, I've seen it happen many, many times, almost every Christmas light season, every one of the techs does it at some point, you forget to turn the lights, the power off, um, but you terminate the last one, and now we can turn the power back on. Now that power is done, we gotta get all these wires in the ceiling, so more magnets and zip ties is the strategy here. So what I like to do is take a bunch of these plugs, tie them all together like this and then we'll stick a zip tie around them here just to tie them up and then we'll put the, I'll also put the magnet through it. Typically you only need one zip tie to hold it and we'll cut off the extra. We strip them off and then what we'll do is we're just going to go up and start plopping these magnets in the ceiling and if there's a spot that has a lot more droop than others we'll add another one to the middle. If you don't knock out a chair, nobody saw nothing. Like I said the click it magnet system is the key to all this. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go up and I'm going to find kind of the best spot I can put it at to not put too much strain on all these stars. So I kind of like over here or potentially right above this one because you can see how I'm pulling this star a little bit. I think we'll go right here. As you can see I kind of pulled this star a little bit. If you look at the wire it's pulled a little bit this way. It's not the end of the world. It won't actually affect too much of the final product. It is moved now a little bit over, but if anything you'll actually make it look better. So now we move on to the next one which Larry conveniently already did for me. This one's a little tricky though because of the vent. We just got to figure out pretty much you just lift them up and figure out where where you want to put it. So I'm looking at the stain on all of them. So we could go here and I think that is where we're gonna go. We're gonna go right here. Actually, I can't if you see I'm pulling this wire a little too far now and that one's still going to go up in the ceiling. So we're going to come over here and stick it right up here. We also could stick it to the duct. I'm going to be honest, you don't have to pull them all together like this one. I'm just going to go right in the middle. The plugs are strong enough for an install like this. They're not going to like these aren't going to come unplugged. They have enough friction. But if you're outside in a tree, the trees can with some wind knock those out. And I left this a little loose on purpose, because now it'll allow it to, oh, I thought I left it loose, but it normally lets it slide a little more. If you leave them loose, you can do that. See how I'm maxed out there? I can't make it, so I'm going to have to come back here. It ain't going to fall off. We trust zip ties for everything. Gaff tape and zip ties, baby. That does everything in this world. And magnets. Can't forget magnets. Magnetization. Just leave them on? Yep. Yep. We just leave them on all night. What am I pulling on here? Am I stuck on something? Make sure I don't get caught on her flowers. Beautiful. Oh this is a fun little side note. These clippers are really sharp on the end. Don't put them in your back pocket and sit down in your car. That hurts. That's all I typically do. Just something like that. It's good enough. Kind of put it there so it's out of the way. If we had some gaff tape we would gaff tape it too. Which I think we might steal some of the DJs. This might be the favorite star one I've ever done. Magnets. Oh we talked about that one in the ceiling. These are the old ones we used to use. These are great. You can get them up there. They're super strong. You can't get them down. They're so strong, you can't get them down. So, click it. Trying to eye up. We're making a chandelier here with a big, a small, and a medium. I think I want that one a little bit higher now. And that's how they fall. And now we've got to re-fluff this whole thing. But, what? Did you get shined in the face? So, a fun inside joke we have here is we complain about HR. Like, that's an HR complaint. Nine times out of ten, it's probably me making some stupid comment. And then I'm like, take it up with HR because I am HR. Only small business owners will relate. Let me tell you, 16 stars versus three is a lot different on the work scale. We just got to come over here, put a magnet, and then bring it down to the power. Shoot one from here, shoot one from here, and then do two over there because this is going to be further back. And then what I want to do with that fourth one. All right, everyone. We're set. I don't think the camera does this justice, honestly. This looks incredible. And we turned on their little backdrop over there. 16 of them to be exact. Four big, four medium, and eight smalls. And then our little chandeliers back here over the bars. And then we also got pin spotting up there too. So there's pin spots on all those as well as the cake table. We are going to go grab some lunch. And then we're going to come back, turn on those pin spots, and then head over to Graylin and see how they are doing with the pipe and draping to set it over there. So yeah, that. This, this is, I love the stuff we do. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.