Noob: Need smoke effect

DramaTeacherM

New Member
I am doing a production for a school one-act contest. No pyro allowed. I need a poof of smoke from a magic spell that a character will appear in. The actor can produce the smoke but I can't have crew members on stage (even hidden). This needs to happen several times during the show so I need to be able to repeat it. I'm looking at smoke paper but I'm worried this won't really be enough effect or canned fog but I'm worried this will dissipate too quickly. I have a fog machine but it's loud and slow and the smoke lingers too long. Any suggestions? Cheap is good but I have a little money to spend if needed. Thanks!
 
Would one of the geyser products from Chauvet do the trick?
We've gotten more than our money's worth out of it over the last three years we've had ours.
The only problem I can think of is that (at least our model) has a rather "casually paced" pump that causes a short delay of maybe 3/4 of a second before spewing fog
 
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Smoke in a can. Have it so that one hand feeds the other. It is cheap and easy to setup and gives great results.
 
Maybe a CO2 extinguisher. They come in a variety of sizes from car glove box on up. I don't think any are easily hidden by a wandering actor and it probably needs to be a fairly beefy one to mask the entrance of another actor. If it were built into a frame somewhere it might be more feasible.
 
I will second the use of the Chauvet geysers. We used one for a small scale production of the Wizard of Oz for both the entrances/exits of the witch and (relocated during the scene change) in front of the wizard's curtain.

One of the nice aspects was the ability to use different LED colors through the remote. We only used green for the witch and then used the others for the wizard.
 
Talc power in a squeeze bulb might do the trick. It will hang in the air for awhile before settling.
 

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