St. Meinrad Rocks

Website

In 2024, we made the website for the 13th annual St. Meinrad Rocks Music Fest.

The Rock

We also got asked to make a sign. They expected a simple yard sign, but I got carried away. Here's how I ended up with an eight-foot-tall rock in a hurricane.

I was feeling creative, so instead of just making something easy, I thought it would be funny to make an actual rock, as if I thought it was a festival for geologists instead of musicians. Now, I'd never done anything like that before, and I had no idea how to make it happen. But it sounded fun, so I started with this mockup.

After many hours researching how other people have made rocks for landscaping or movies, I decided to give up. I don’t have the artistic skill needed to carve rocks out of foam or concrete, so this was obviously the wrong project for me...

But my subconscious disagreed, and I soon found myself in Blender making a 3D model. I’m not very fluent in there, but I managed to make something I liked. I kept the number of faces low, and used an add-on to unfold it like a papercraft model.

The plan was to cut it out of cardboard (chipboard, really) and fold it up into a 3D rock. I opened it in Inkscape, and separated it into islands that would fit into the sheets of material. It took a few tries to get it right, but I ended up with 17 different laser nests. I scored the fold lines, and labeled some of the edges where pieces attach.

I laser-cut all the pieces, and moved into the garage. I was hoping that I’d be able to lay out all the pieces, tape them together, and fold them up. But I failed to account for how big this thing was – there wasn’t enough room to do that. Instead, I had to build it piece-by-piece. This went on for days.

Every few hours of work I alternated between thinking “oh no, this isn’t going to work” and “wow, this looks pretty cool”. Sometimes being able to push through what seems like a total failure is the hardest part of a project.

I hadn’t planned for any sort of internal framework, but I did have some 2x4s just in case. Those ended up being used more as a second set of hands than any actual support. I’d just build an impromptu stand, attach a piece of cardboard to it while I worked on another part, then dismantle it and move on. In the end, the cardboard fully supported itself.

As I mentioned earlier, my artistic ability is very limited, so this is where my wife took over. A few days later she had painted the whole thing, and we had a sign.

We had hoped to have it set up for the entire week leading up to the festival, but I hadn’t planned on rain. As we neared the finish line, a hurricane was approaching Florida, and the residual wind and rain were expected to make it all the way to us in the Midwest.

So even though we had weeks of work in the rock, we decided at the last minute to make a simple yard sign instead. We put that out for the week (along with the caveman that my brother made), and the rock stayed in my garage until the day before the festival.

In the meantime, we tried to weather-proof the rock. We covered the inside with vinyl to prevent the cardboard from soaking up moisture. I did a rough calculation of how heavy it needed to be to avoid blowing away in the high winds, and bought enough sandbags to hold it down.

When the time came, we pulled the rock out of the garage. I hadn’t considered the height when I designed it, so we had to tilt it to fit through the garage door. It was surprisingly light – we easily loaded it onto the truck with only two people.

We strapped it down, and took off to deliver it. You could see the rock “breathe”, flexing in and out as we drove down the road. I’d love to know what people were thinking as we went past.

It was dark and getting ready to rain again as we finished setting it up. We put it in place, and I crawled inside through the little door to stake it down and fill it with sand. I crawled out, and we sealed the door, painting it to match everything else and hide the seams.

On the walk back to the car, I noticed that my phone was missing. We thought maybe it was lying in the grass where we had put our supplies, but it wasn’t there. So someone called it, and of course it was sealed up inside the rock.

In the garage I had been using a light on an extension cord to see inside the rock, but out here in the wild I had to use the flashlight on my phone. I must have set it down inside the rock, and left it inside. So we had to cut it open, get my phone out, and repaint the door.

It stormed that night, but the rock stayed standing. The wind was strong enough to rip the door open, but other than that, everything seemed fine. The cardboard was starting to sag, but it rested on the 2x4s inside. By the next morning though, it had collapsed. Even though the cardboard was mostly intact, it got so wet and heavy that the 2x4s broke, and it crumbled to the ground.

So in the end, it was a failure as a sign, but it looked really cool while it lasted!

– WT

Originally posted here on 2025-01-13