School Talent Showcase – kerricreates

Every year, my daughter’s school holds a talent show and it is something that everyone looks forward to. I have the wonderful opportunity of being a part of the Theater Booster Club (TBC). The TBC is a group of parents who support all things “theater” at the school, and one of my favorite tasks is creating fun decor for our events.

Last year, we had an “Old Hollywood Theme,” which included giant film reels and oversized popcorn boxes. I was hoping to reuse some of our incredible props from last year, and the red and white striped popcorn boxes were just begging to be used in a circus-themed event. So last May, our team started planning to make this year’s talent show “CIRCUS” an EPIC event for the kids and their families to enjoy.

As you can see, our fabulous popcorn boxes made another debut, but the backlit silhouettes and circus sign stole the show. Our stage was amazing! Just enough to make for an eye-catching backdrop for our performers, but not too much to take away from their acts. Here’s how we got this effect. Once again, my mini mooka projector came in handy. (#commissionsearned) I found some cool silhouettes on Pinterest and took a screenshot of them. Then I wirelessly connected the projector to my computer and drew them out on 1/4 of a cardboard refrigerator box. I was able to get all 4 silhouettes out of one large box, and I painted them black with acrylic paint.

Because cardboard is so flimsy, and we need the silhouettes to stand up, our awesome facilities guy at our school built us 5 wooden stands to attach the silhouettes to. We stretched white muslin around the frames. Each frame was 6 ft tall, so I purchased 10 yards of muslin to cover all 5 frames.

The middle frame was purposefully empty because we opened the talent show with a rendition of “The Greatest Show” from the movie The Greatest Showman. Our ringmaster stood in a pose behind the middle silhouette, and as he started to sing, he made his way onto the stage, followed by a choir of 8 other students. We had 4 kids already on stage waving signs that said “WOOAAH” to get the audience to participate. Then the rest of the kids (who wanted to be in the opening act) paraded across the stage and around the amphitheater, singing along as they went. It was such a fun way to kick off the night.

As the evening went on and it got darker in the outdoor amphitheater, the colored lights behind the silhouettes became vibrant and created such a wonderful display.

Not only was our stage top-notch, but we added some wonderful touches all around the room. One of our amazing moms painted a huge clown that was mounted above the double doorway. I was able to project the clown onto the 4 panels of another refrigerator box and traced out the image (that I also found on Pinterest). Then I handed it off to the most creative mom, who took it to the next level by adding additional cardboard sides to make the mouth touch all the way to the floor. She painted it with such detail that it looked fantastic, and she added PVC pipe to help mount it above the doors. You can see just how tall it is in the picture of my daughter and I standing under it.

That same mom created a ticket booth at the entrance, and I made a big sign that said, “WELCOME TO THE GREATEST SHOW” using my Cricut Maker 3 and black cardstock. (#commissionsearned)

Our team painted the most adorable circus-themed “photo booth” with a lion, ringmaster, and clown…another image that I projected onto an open refrigerator box. We used a variety of colors of acrylic paint and brushes and it turned out great! #commissionsearned

My Cricut came in handy once again for these directional signs, and they were not just for decoration, they actually led to the locations displayed on the arrows. I used colored cardstock in red, yellow, and black and a variety of fonts from Cricut Design Space. We wanted to be able to reuse the arrows that we had painted and cut out of cardboard, so I attached the letters with glue dots so they were easily removable. The glue dots also came in handy for sticking the white and yellow balloons together to look like clumps of popcorn in the oversized popcorn boxes. #commissionsearned

A couple of tips for those of you who want to try out making these oversized popcorn boxes. They are made out of free refrigerator boxes from our local appliance store. Be sure to grab a couple of inexpensive nets and an electric balloon pump. If you line the inside top of the box with a net, you will need a lot fewer balloons. Also, be sure to blow up your balloons in a variety of sizes to give them more of a “popcorn” vibe, and use those glue dots to cascade a few popcorn pieces over the sides of the box. Painter tape is super helpful in making your red and white lines straight, and the popcorn logo was created on a piece of white poster board and taped onto the box. #commissionsearned

Be sure to subscribe to my blog for more amazing DIYs, crafts, and more. We are already planning next year’s show and it’s going to be a good one!!!

This school year, I have the privilege of being a part of the Theater Booster Club at my daughter’s school. The TBC is a group of parents who support the school’s performing arts program. One of my favorite events each year is the Talent Show. I love this incredible opportunity for students to showcase their talents. This year, we had singers, musicians, dancers, a beat-boxer, an aerial silk performer, and so much more. It was an amazing show!

To help make this event even more special for the kids, the TBC got together over the summer to brainstorm theme ideas and to decide on what types of decor we wanted to create. We settled on “Old Hollywood” for our theme, and went to work gathering supplies and crafting all the things. I hit up a local appliance store for as many refrigerator boxes as I could fit in my van. We put 2 aside to make into giant popcorn boxes and another for a “media-inspired” filmstrip countdown to use as a photo backdrop. Two more boxes were designated for giant film reels, and the rest we used for a film strip photo station that we set up for the cutest picture keepsakes from the Talent Show.

Our team gathered one hot September morning to start painting red and white striped popcorn boxes and black film reels. I had cut out the film reels a couple of days before (after projecting them onto cardboard using my Mouka mini projector). This is a must-have tool for making oversized props and I have gotten a ton of use out of it in the past 2 years. We used painter’s tape to make the lines on the popcorn boxes and used paint from Lowes instead of craft paint for these oversized props because it is thicker and required fewer coats. I also used my projector to trace the POPCORN sign onto a piece of white poster board and then painted it with the same red paint we used for the stripes. #commissionsearned

Putting the film reels together was the next project. I purchased 2 small cardboard poster tubes, cut out 4 circles that were smaller than the 6 ft film reels, and asked my husband for some help with attaching the pieces. We spray-painted the inside of the reels with gold Rustoleum spray paint to give them a metallic appearance, attached two cardboard circles to the poster tube, and transported everything to the school because they were too big to transport once they were all put together.

In the meantime, I got to work on the filmstrip of all of the kids who participated in the Talent Show. This was the most amazing prop that we created because it made the kids feel like celebrities! They loved seeing the giant film strip with their faces when they walked into the amphitheater on the night of the show.

To pull this off, our team set up a camera on the days of the talent show auditions. Before each child auditioned, we snapped a photo with a white backdrop behind them. We gave them photo booth prop options and encouraged them to pose in a variety of ways. The kids didn’t know what they were posing for at the time, so we were able to surprise them.

After we gathered all of the photos, our team printed them in black and white onto 11×14 paper. We used white poster board for the film strip and pieced it together with a curve to fit along the walls of the amphitheater. This was definitely not an easy project. It required a lot of measuring, gluing, painting, and cutting, and was very time-consuming…but it was worth every minute when we saw the looks on the kid’s faces on the night of the show.

After painting the 2-inch black film strip lines around each of the kid’s photos, we used white vinyl squares, cut from the Cricut Maker for the finishing touch, making it look very much like a winding film strip. I also added a smaller bit of blank film strip around the inside of the giant 6ft film reels so it gave the illusion that the film strip was coming out of the reel. My husband helped me attach the black reels to the gold centers with screws, washers, and bolts and they held together really well. #commissionsearned

The final project was the photo station. For the backdrop, I used a large sturdy refrigerator box opened up. I had gray and white house paint left over from some projects at home, and I used black duct tape, black electrical tape, black acrylic paint, and my Mouka projector. I also set aside a couple more large pieces of cardboard for the film strip. I started by outlining the entire box with black duct tape. Then I made 4 distinct panels by adding strips of tape to the folds. I painted a white stripe along the top and bottom and then added smaller tape strips to make the film squares. Another strip of tape along the tops of these created the top and bottom of the film strip. Next, I projected two circles onto the middle of each panel and added 1, 2, 3, and 4 for the countdown. I painted the numbers with black acrylic paint and used black electrical tape for the thinner lines.

After projecting the film strip onto a piece of cardboard, I traced it and cut out two more identical pieces. I layered the 3 cardboard cutouts and glued them with E600 glue. I put bricks on top for several hours while they dried and then painted the entire thing black. The 3 layers made the filmstrip a lot more sturdy, which is important when lots of people will be handling a prop. The white rectangles were once again, vinyl cut out from the Cricut, and I added a thick layer of Mod Podge over the top to give it a shiny finish and to keep the white rectangles from falling off. #commissionsearned

On the day of the event, our team got to work putting up all of the decor so that the room was ready to go at showtime. One of our TBC members is gifted at balloon displays and she made the popcorn boxes “POP” with white and yellow balloons. She also added the black and white balloon displays to the photo station to give it a polished look. The facilities guys at the school were instrumental in hanging the giant film reels and film strips and helping to make our vision come to life.

It was definitely a group effort to pull off this giant undertaking, but our TBC team is full of creative parents who get the job done! The Talent Show was a huge success! The kids felt like “stars” and all of our hours of hard work were so worth it!!! The highlight of the night for me was that my daughter got to perform a song with her dad, which is a memory that I know they will both cherish forever. You can see their smiling faces in the filmstrip at the bottom of this post.