Help With 2012 Project..Please

[Roger Leon Forbes]

While visting with a friend, who due to a strock, is a resident at a local nursing home one of the other residents told me they had to miss our display this year due to illness and being in the nursing home. That was the spark for a new project for 2012.
I want to build up a mobile display that can be set up in a few hours and take it to nursing home's, hosptal's or where every it might be needed. The number of channels is not a issue as I will get the controllers need. What I would like is some input on elements and how to build them up. I was thinking for the arch's using 5 gal buckets with sand or make up some type of stand. As for a small mega tree I am not for sure.
I know some of you have done displays at other locations than your house, so please share some of you idea's and give me some input.
Please pm me or post here as I am on about everyday. Thanks Roger

[Ken Benedict]

Your arches can be supported with a piece of PVC or conduit from the back center; after you wrap the lights, make a "Marty Fan" by stringing multicolored lights from the center out to the edges of the arch. That will take one controller; 8 channels for the arch, 8 for the Marty Fan.

Make a candy cane spinner from a PVC frame, chicken wire on top and ty-wrap 12 candy canes on it from the center outwards. I built one last year and just tilted it up on a 10 foot pole, plugged it it and it ran very well. Cheap too.

Make a snowflake tower that can tilt up and hold 8-12 big snowflakes, each on a seperate channel. Program it so it goes up with the music.

If you feel comfortable doing it, get several 200 light strings for people to hold in their laps, and light them up with the music. There's a safety issue here, so plan accordingly and ask the nursing home if it's OK. It would be fun having your lap light up. You could also get some 12VDC light strings that may be safer; control them with a DC controller.

Not exactly Christmas related, but I got some cheap pink flamingos and stuffed a 70 count incandescent string in them, stuck them in the ground and had fun programming them.

I had HolidayCoro.com make me some 18" smiley faces that I populated and stuck up high. I didn't expect they would be so popular with the kids.

If the nursing home is OK with their patients holding a wad of Christmas lights, and you can get 32 of them to volunteer, have them sit down (or in wheelchairs), face the audience and become a 32-key piano. I can supply the sequences.

See

There's more fun ideas, but that's a start.