Intelligent Light Tips & Tricks

[Illusion]

Hey, just thought I'd start a new thread sharing any cool tips/tricks/effects/movements etc. people have found with intelligent lights - what equipment, how you programmed them, what it looked like...

Could be a particular sequence from a rock concert, or a particular effect from a West End/Broadway production – anything that you thought looked cool, but it has to have been done with your ‘regular’ smart light, no special dedicated units or effects processors!

[Illusion]

...so i'll kick us off
Once saw a very realistic tube/subway train sequence in My Fair Lady (I think!) – two ETC S4R’s shuttered to rectangles, and slightly misaligned + a couple of rotating gobos to give the impression of movement, in conjunction with random blackouts (+ sound fx + actors movement).

[soundlight]

VL3000 spots. Four of 'em. Corners of the stage, aka ends of proscenium pipe and ends of fifth electric. There are a bunch of dancers in the center of the stage. As they start to walk out and away, making the circle bigger and bigger and bigger, the VL3K's pull out and begin to zoom out, slowly expanding to cover the whole stage as the circle of dancers expands. Amazing effect, and it took place over a minute or so. Just amazing. Hats off to the TD (also LD for some pieces) who designed that piece. Amazing.

Here's the opening pic (I hope that this works): http://www.bucknell.edu/x32448.xml

[len]

Nice. I like working with iris and/or zoom whenever I can.

Since I do mostly rock and roll, I do a lot of punch stuff, ACL chase, crowd blinders, etc. I like taking the upstage row and making them fan from straight down to up and out, over the crowd. Sometimes I'll just run them out to the center of the house, then strobe or shutter chase them for a second or two, then fly them out on a ballyhoo and finally kill them.

[soundlight]

In the rock 'n roll world, I found a good idea from a show that I helped rig. They used MAC 250+ units for this effect. Take a good dichroic breakup (which they had in the units at this time), pop in the rotating three-facet prism, throw the gobo in to reverse the opposite direction, and do a color chase under the whole thing. Pretty friggin sweet. Especially when it's projected right behind the band onto the black and switches sides in arcs over the back of the drummer. This was at a festival stage, and they had two MAC 250+'s on the front truss and two on the back. The back ones were projecting the same pattern of the reverse prism vs. gobo rotation and color chase onto the frontman of the band as backlighting. Really sweet!

PRISMS ARE AWESOME. Three facet, five facet, nine facet, eleven facet (AMDJ/Elation have some stuff with 11 facet, and I want to try it out...).

[gafftaper]

A cool trick that could work on a low budget too!!

I saw a concert recently where they dropped the big 3 foot mirror ball for one song and blasted it with pure white light from a dozen moving lights... We'll we've all seen that before. The cool trick was they dropped in gobos with several different sizes of dots in and then rotated the gobos. The difference in the effect was stunning. We are used to dots of light casually rotating. In this case however they were flinging themselves in all different directions like a swarm of mad bees. It was really cool and a trick that anybody with a couple of gobo rotators can use to kick up their mirror ball.

[DarSax]

What a great idea for a thread.

This is just a quick, probably very unteresting one. If you have a rig of spots and washes, and are using the spots for aerials and stuff, mix it up a while every so often. Have the spots stop moving (pointing straight up, down, however they're hung), and have the washes change color, move, spin, etc. Just a little change up for ya.

[PhantomD]

Police lights effect.

Four scans down the front, four sets of 3 floods (red, blue, white) - police car flasher effect with as many effects as possible bundled into one!

PS
I'm back!

[Radman]

Take a look at the ESP Vision 2.0 Design Contest winning design. Amazing and full of ideas. That video actually is what got me into MCR. I never liked them before that.

[DarSax]

Radman--where would I find that design? A cursory google check got me not far D: