finnb5
New Member
Hi,
I'm a student in my high school's tech theatre program, and our spring musical this year is going to be Footloose. My Director wants to keep our cyc lit for effectively the whole show. The issue is, our cyc line is quite frankly mediocre. We are planning on subbing out our green for a deep amber, and the blue for a darker blue but there are several issues.
[Red] [Green] [Blue]
It is being lit by 9 Altman fc-1s purchased in 1998. We use the colors R27 Medium Red, R91 Primary Green, and R80 Primary Blue Respectively. I don't remember the exact dimensions of the Cyc itself, but the risers are probably a little over 6 feet for scale. It is a very tall and narrow space...kind of weird, but here we are.
The colors in the pictures above are pretty realistic and in my opinion, kind of drab. This is because we recently got 3 beautiful Chauvet Colorado 3's, 180 watt rgbw, dmx 8-45 degree zoom, they're my best friends. When aimed at the cyc, they produce a beautiful color with such intensity that our normal cyc line looks like someone put christmas tree lights just under the cyc line. They look pathetic when any other lights are turned on for normal theatre things and in general are just sad. [2 Colorados hitting the cyc with green at full].
In addition to that, there are multiple issues with the color on the cyc. We plan to change out our blue, but here is the most intense blue from the colorado compared with the cyc. My phone makes it look weird, but the LED blue looks so much better in real life. Here is the respective CIE Chromaticity color picker. When I try to make the LEDs look as close to our R80 Cyc as possible, this is the Chromaticity diagram I get, for a generally nasty blue. There is a stark contrast. This is true for the green as well, but I don't have as many photos. I want to put a different gel other than R80 to fix this but I don't know which one to do, I was thinking of R382 Congo Blue that has a chromaticity diagram much resembling that of the LEDs, but I worry that it just won't be bright enough, or the color won't look right etc.
Furthermore, being able to get strong/variable pinks in this show is something that the director and I both really want to achieve but, (and this might change with the Congo blue) whenever we mix the R80 and the R27 together we get a blueberries-in-yogurt super pastel pinky-purple mess, which I think is a result of using additive mixing two not so precise colors. There is a struggle between getting the right, intense, saturate color and getting any punch at all, which is hard to get already.
Additionally, what amber should we use? It seems like R21 Soft Golden amber isn't a bad choice, but we also used R316 Gallo Gold for backlight and I really like it but I don't think it's intense enough. I don't know what to do in that case.
The director has given me about $1000 to work with in addition to our other fixtures. We have 14 Par 56s, 6 6x12s (that is how old they are), 6 6x9s, 3 Star Pars, 12 Cyc units (but only 10 circuits on the cyc line), 3 Shakespeares, 5 fresnels, 3 Colorado 3s, and 1 Chauvet DJ Intimidator 355z IRC. The director wants this show to visually blow the audience out of their seats, so he wants to use most/all of the $1000 renting money on getting like 40 pars or something. We are situated in Ohio (for renting), and the cheapest cyc-ish line I can find for 2 weeks that would cover the whole 20 feet of the cyc width, costs about $750. Not ideal. I also don't want to aim the Colorados at the cyc because then 1. there is one less to work with for doing washes, and 2. it looks radial when you only aim one at the cyc, and it just looks wrong. I don't know how to explain it, but it just looks wrong.
TL;DR
Issue 1. Cyc does not punch
Issue 2. Blue sucks
Issue 3. What amber do I use?
Issue 4. Pink Sucks
What do we do????
I want the show to look like this. I realize we have far tighter a production budget than they do, but that is my goal.
I'm a student in my high school's tech theatre program, and our spring musical this year is going to be Footloose. My Director wants to keep our cyc lit for effectively the whole show. The issue is, our cyc line is quite frankly mediocre. We are planning on subbing out our green for a deep amber, and the blue for a darker blue but there are several issues.
[Red] [Green] [Blue]
It is being lit by 9 Altman fc-1s purchased in 1998. We use the colors R27 Medium Red, R91 Primary Green, and R80 Primary Blue Respectively. I don't remember the exact dimensions of the Cyc itself, but the risers are probably a little over 6 feet for scale. It is a very tall and narrow space...kind of weird, but here we are.
The colors in the pictures above are pretty realistic and in my opinion, kind of drab. This is because we recently got 3 beautiful Chauvet Colorado 3's, 180 watt rgbw, dmx 8-45 degree zoom, they're my best friends. When aimed at the cyc, they produce a beautiful color with such intensity that our normal cyc line looks like someone put christmas tree lights just under the cyc line. They look pathetic when any other lights are turned on for normal theatre things and in general are just sad. [2 Colorados hitting the cyc with green at full].
In addition to that, there are multiple issues with the color on the cyc. We plan to change out our blue, but here is the most intense blue from the colorado compared with the cyc. My phone makes it look weird, but the LED blue looks so much better in real life. Here is the respective CIE Chromaticity color picker. When I try to make the LEDs look as close to our R80 Cyc as possible, this is the Chromaticity diagram I get, for a generally nasty blue. There is a stark contrast. This is true for the green as well, but I don't have as many photos. I want to put a different gel other than R80 to fix this but I don't know which one to do, I was thinking of R382 Congo Blue that has a chromaticity diagram much resembling that of the LEDs, but I worry that it just won't be bright enough, or the color won't look right etc.
Furthermore, being able to get strong/variable pinks in this show is something that the director and I both really want to achieve but, (and this might change with the Congo blue) whenever we mix the R80 and the R27 together we get a blueberries-in-yogurt super pastel pinky-purple mess, which I think is a result of using additive mixing two not so precise colors. There is a struggle between getting the right, intense, saturate color and getting any punch at all, which is hard to get already.
Additionally, what amber should we use? It seems like R21 Soft Golden amber isn't a bad choice, but we also used R316 Gallo Gold for backlight and I really like it but I don't think it's intense enough. I don't know what to do in that case.
The director has given me about $1000 to work with in addition to our other fixtures. We have 14 Par 56s, 6 6x12s (that is how old they are), 6 6x9s, 3 Star Pars, 12 Cyc units (but only 10 circuits on the cyc line), 3 Shakespeares, 5 fresnels, 3 Colorado 3s, and 1 Chauvet DJ Intimidator 355z IRC. The director wants this show to visually blow the audience out of their seats, so he wants to use most/all of the $1000 renting money on getting like 40 pars or something. We are situated in Ohio (for renting), and the cheapest cyc-ish line I can find for 2 weeks that would cover the whole 20 feet of the cyc width, costs about $750. Not ideal. I also don't want to aim the Colorados at the cyc because then 1. there is one less to work with for doing washes, and 2. it looks radial when you only aim one at the cyc, and it just looks wrong. I don't know how to explain it, but it just looks wrong.
TL;DR
Issue 1. Cyc does not punch
Issue 2. Blue sucks
Issue 3. What amber do I use?
Issue 4. Pink Sucks
What do we do????
I want the show to look like this. I realize we have far tighter a production budget than they do, but that is my goal.