Star drop quick and easy

The longer story...

In the past I have made my own star drops by making a black drop and poking thousands of LED Christmas tree lights or fairy lights through it. It always made me a bit uneasy having the electrics in such close proximity to the fabric, even though it was IFR. I came up with a brilliant solution by using an older black drop, cut a few hundred 1" holes in it, then hung a mylar rain curtain upstage with some cyc lights hitting the mylar. Pretty effective, and I could put a scrim in between to mute or make more twinkles as the mylar danced behind the sharkstooth.

I need a star drop for our upcoming Side Show production and I pulled out the holey black drop only to realize that it's fire cert is WAY expired. I could re-treat it, but it's also developed a case of mildew while sitting unattended during the pandemic, and also it has rotted enough that I don't think it will hold its own weight if flown.

I don't have the budget for the fabric, nor do I think have the time to make a new one. (and I'm sure as heck not putting holes in my only other black drop.) I have tried mylar on styrofoam balls with a scrim and my iteration of that looked very much like an elementary school attempt.

Ideas for a quick and effective star drop? I can make the time if I have to fabricate it, or I can find a creative way to stretch the budget if I have to find fabric, that's just a fact I have to push through. I have some semi-shear poly fabric which I can treat, but not a fan FR treating a flammable fabric.

Things in the arsenal: A truckload of LED christmas lights, black scrim, mylar rain curtain (which is actually blue, but creative light choices can fix that).

Ideas so far: 1) buy several of those natural canvas drop cloths on the cheap, sew them together, dye/paint it black, do the poke thing with LED Christmas lights. 2) same idea, but put a thousand holes in the canvas and use the mylar/scrim, 3) some brilliant idea that you're about to tell me.

For reference, the proscenium is 40'w and 27' tall, and we typically trim borders at about 22-24'. I usually make drops for that space 24-27' tall and 40-50' wide. For something like this that will be upstage, I can imagine 24x40 will be fine.

Have you considered this option:

EDIT: Scrolling down that thread I see you have used that before. Nevermind!

In the past I've used Fiber optic. A real advantage is that you can poke it through almost any fabric without creating a hole and the fibers can be taped in place. I made Star drop curtains that completely surrounded a set once. I like fiber optic as it can be driven with LEDs and you can alter the colors and intensities if you want. The price point is pretty good as well.

Van said:

In the past I've used Fiber optic. A real advantage is that you can poke it through almost any fabric without creating a hole and the fibers can be taped in place. I made Star drop curtains that completely surrounded a set once. I like fiber optic as it can be driven with LEDs and you can alter the colors and intensities if you want. The price point is pretty good as well.

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The other great advantage to using fiber optics is that the pinpoints of light are way smaller than anything else and looks much more realistic. Pinpoints instead of blobs of light.
I just purchased some fiber optic cables on eBay for when I need to build another star drop.

I went really cheap and purchased raw fiber on a spool then built my own bundles. Amazon is probably the best location now it used to be Ebay. Quick look on Google for "Plastic Fiber optic spool" shows a lot of options in prices and lengths some shopping links.
BTW I use to stick the through the fabric then have someone on the other side touch the end with a soldering iron. Different size mushroomed ends render different sized stars.

curtis73 said:

The longer story...

as lights. 2) same idea, but put a thousand holes in the canvas and use the mylar/scrim, 3) some brilliant idea that you're about to tell me.

For reference, the proscenium is 40'w and 27' tall, and we typically trim borders at about 22-24'. I usually make drops for that space 24-27' tall and 40-50' wide. For something like this that will be upstage, I can imagine 24x40 will be fine.

Click to expand...

For Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, I pinned white christmas lights with the dark green wiring to the front of our black traveller, and since we had a split black scrim, put the black scrim directly in front more or less hung from the traveller rigging and pinned down at the corners. Pull the traveller... audience is used to seeing black traveller, and then lights up.. pow the money shot. Cheap and effective with what we had on hand.

Van said:

I went really cheap and purchased raw fiber on a spool then built my own bundles. Amazon is probably the best location now it used to be Ebay. Quick look on Google for "Plastic Fiber optic spool" shows a lot of options in prices and lengths some shopping links.
BTW I use to stick the through the fabric then have someone on the other side touch the end with a soldering iron. Different size mushroomed ends render different sized stars.

Click to expand...

How did you drive the light? The filaments are cheap enough, just curious what your light source was.

jtweigandt said:

For Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, I pinned white christmas lights with the dark green wiring to the front of our black traveller, and since we had a split black scrim, put the black scrim directly in front more or less hung from the traveller rigging and pinned down at the corners. Pull the traveller... audience is used to seeing black traveller, and then lights up.. pow the money shot. Cheap and effective with what we had on hand.

Click to expand...

I suppose with careful lighting/avoiding spill, that would be highly effective. Thank you.

Van said:

I went really cheap and purchased raw fiber on a spool then built my own bundles. Amazon is probably the best location now it used to be Ebay. Quick look on Google for "Plastic Fiber optic spool" shows a lot of options in prices and lengths some shopping links.
BTW I use to stick the through the fabric then have someone on the other side touch the end with a soldering iron. Different size mushroomed ends render different sized stars.

Click to expand...

That is a neat trick to make different sized stars. When I built my only full-stage star drop back in the 1970's, I bought a spool of plastic fiber optic and used an old black velour curtain, putting a touch of fabric glue (I think) on the back
to hold each strand in place. For an illuminator, I used a Kodak Ektagraphic slide projector (1970's remember!) and fabricated an adapter to hold the bundle of fiber. The heat absorbing glass in the optical path
prevented melting the fibers, and with split gel in a slide mount, could get variations in the star pattern. The projector lamp could be dimmed with an external wall-box type dimmer plugged into the dissolve unit receptacle.
Those were the days. Today I would probably try to use a RGB LED pinspot as an illuminator.

So it's not as important on the light source? I was thinking that given the discretion with how the fibers emit light they might be picky about how they GET light.

Is there a lumen target I should be hitting based on the flux (as a function of the number of fibers?) My concern is that if I'm going the DIY route, I don't have time to throw a few days into building it only to load in on Monday for a Friday opening only to realize that it sucks.

curtis73 said:

So it's not as important on the light source? I was thinking that given the discretion with how the fibers emit light they might be picky about how they GET light.

Is there a lumen target I should be hitting based on the flux (as a function of the number of fibers?) My concern is that if I'm going the DIY route, I don't have time to throw a few days into building it only to load in on Monday for a Friday opening only to realize that it sucks.

Click to expand...

In my earlier post with photos in this thread, what you see emitted from the fibers is the result of a small LED flashlight being held against the bundled fibers in the metal ferrule.
Even for a large stage, it will not be difficult to find a suitable light source. You could buy a "fiber optic illuminator" made for the purpose if you don't have time to rig something else.
The main thing is to not melt the plastic fibers. To me, the look of a fiber optic star drop is way more convincing than a LED star drop. With clever routing of the fibers, many effects are even possible.

Melting the fiber ends on the supply side is the biggest issue I ever had. Using an LED source is very helpful< Not available back in the day>. IF you go the fiber way it is also important that you put all the supply ends in a ferrule, or wrap them tightly in gaff. having them lined up as best as possible keeps you from losing light due to it hitting the ends at an angle. There are a bunch of companies that sell LED Fiberoptic light sources. Many are very cheap and the really good ones are really expensive. Take a look around you might find something that fits your bill.

You folks are awesome. Thank you. You've also given me a rabbit hole to explore.

How about a Bliss light star projector versus drop. A lot less labor intensive.

I can look into them, but I can't imagine a $49 bedroom effect would be enough oomph to light a 24 x 40 black drop in a 700-seat proscenium. Unless I'm looking at the wrong product?

When I worked for the lighting company we had some “professional “ ones we used for events with success.

The BL-50s are a great product, but I haven't had much success using them on stages. Great for dimly lit parties and those kinds of spaces. Once they have to compete with other lighting they fall of pretty rapidly.

Van said:

Melting the fiber ends on the supply side is the biggest issue I ever had. Using an LED source is very helpful< Not available back in the day>. IF you go the fiber way it is also important that you put all the supply ends in a ferrule, or wrap them tightly in gaff. having them lined up as best as possible keeps you from losing light due to it hitting the ends at an angle. There are a bunch of companies that sell LED Fiberoptic light sources. Many are very cheap and the really good ones are really expensive. Take a look around you might find something that fits your bill.

Click to expand...

One "back in the day" discovery was that a boneyard video projector worked good and doesn't get hot enough to melt fibers. I had a bunch of older VGA resolution units that still had plenty of life left. The end of the fiber bundle was about an inch in diameter and we lined it up close to the narrowest portion of the light beam from the projector lens. Anything with images you decide to project are sufficiently out of focus at that point that it just shows as vaguely random intensities but no star remains unlit. You can use the paint program in windows to make stripes or lines of different off-white colors so there's a pleasing variance in the different fiber stars. Playing a video or animation made for some really interesting twinkle effects.